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| Next stop: results-ville. |
How often are you looking at your web results? I mean, really looking at them?
Chances are not
enough, and not as deeply as you should be.
Many businesses
hang their hats on driving leads or sales through their website or other online
channels such as Facebook or Twitter, but few people in these businesses seem
to actually know what's going on with those channels. Even fewer businesses use
web channels to inform real business strategies.
As we move into
a more singular notion of online user experience, branding, media mixing, and
offline business results, your team should be living in online results. Those
results should be constantly analyzed, reviewed, mulled over, and squeezed for
every drop of meaning. Why? Because they are real-time, real-life focus groups
that can lead to invaluable insights about your audiences, messaging, content,
strategies, products and more.
So how do you produce an efficient reporting system where online results effectively inform business strategy?
1. Come up with a
measurement strategy: This doesn't mean going to Google Analytics and placing
some code. This means sitting down, maybe even across departments, to figure
out how to best tackle measurement of all online channels through to the
primary campaign objectives. Get some poster paper, a big white board, or some
post it notes and map out every single channel, asset and user experience step
tied to your online business, then determine how each one will be accurately
measured. When this process happens up front, it creates a streamlined roadmap
that identifies proper tracking mechanisms, steps and potential holes or
opportunities within that system. Additionally, revisiting your measurement
strategies at least once every 6 months will ensure that nothing falls through
the cracks.
2. Assign
responsibility: Someone must own analytics. Someone who can jump in on a daily
basis or even more frequently; someone who has the time and the wherewithal to
spend a good amount of time "deep-diving" into the results, putting
together trend charts, making acute assessments, and interpreting data for
everyone else. Most of all, someone needs to be responsible for the
implementation, analysis and follow ups related to reporting. Unfortunately,
many companies think it's enough to have a marketing manager peruse website
stats once or twice per week, or an intern jumping in and out of results and
sharing a "hits" dashboard, but what is that doing other than wasting
everyone's time and massaging some egos? If you don't have anybody in the
organization who has the time to truly spend time with web reporting and
analysis, hire someone who has the analytical chops to make sense out of number
sauce. You won't regret it, and neither will your bottom line.
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| Set your goals, and your goal celebrations |
3. Set quantifiable
objectives: One of the biggest pitfalls I see in reporting and analytics is the
lack of quantifiable benchmarks. Setting numeric goals before doing any
reporting or campaign planning helps to solidify the "why" while also
assigning additional responsibility to the program. Don't let your teams get
away with vague goals. If the goal of the program is "awareness" or
"engagement" ask, what does that mean, numbers-wise? A certain time
on site? Impressions? How will those numbers positively impact the leads, sales
or ROI of the program? Presenting these challenges early creates an environment
of accountability, since no one wants to proceed with a plan that doesn't
improve the quantifiable results. Moreover, having numeric goals that EVERYONE
agrees to and understands means that the entire team (whoever is looking at the
results in some fashion) agree on the direction and expectations of the
program. When it falls below goal, everyone knows, and there is a concerted
effort to improve with a distinct objective in mind. On the other end, when the
program exceeds goal, everyone can be involved in the celebration.
4. Set up all of
your goal and media tracking (and keep documentation): Setting up the tracking
should be easy, but if you are working across platforms or with unique actions
or goals in mind, it can prove quite difficult. My biggest recommendation is to
document each piece of code along with naming convention, placement, reasoning,
vendor, etc. so that anybody can view and understand the direction for
tracking. This also helps when something doesn't work properly, falls off, or
has questions around it.
5. Install a
reporting system: Set the expectations for who, how and when reports will be
created and delivered. Find a balance between "templates" or easy to
update reports and those that include a fair amount of custom data or deep
analysis. You may want to consider more frequent reporting that touches on key
data and trends (the "need to know" information) while less frequent,
yet still scheduled, reports provide more in-depth and customized analysis and
results. Map out your reporting schedule and responsibilities and make sure to
stick to them. Additionally, use excel macros, custom dashboards, platform APIs
or report scheduling tools on hand to automate as many numbers as possible, so
the analyst can focus more on the "why" and less on pulling numbers
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| Schedule your web reports |
6. Set up regular
results status meetings with key team members: A good way to keep reports on
schedule is to set up regular status updates with people that matter. This way
the reports manager understands that others are expecting and depending on the
results, and the importance of the reports themselves are heightened. You'd be
surprised at how much interest these numbers garner once everyone is sitting
down and going through them, not to mention how many important takeaways and
action steps can be hashed out.
7. Measure to cost:
At some level, all results should boil down to cost; more specifically, cost
per acquisition/lead and ROI or profit margin. These will be the numbers that
drive true action, since everyone should be invested in the bottom line of the
program, and there's no better way to get buy-in or prove success than focusing
on the monetary value.
8. Follow the 80/20
reporting rules: 80% of an analyst's time should be spent analyzing, while just
20% should be spent doing actual reporting. Unfortunately these numbers are
often swapped and most of the time is spent running reports, finding numbers,
and doing calculations. If this is a concern of yours, do an audit of the time
spent for reports - is your team spending an inordinate amount of time pulling
data or formatting? If so, revisit the reporting system in place, find out
where you can automate or template-ize, and identify what the key performance
indicators should be regularly. Then, discuss the most efficient method
possible of pulling and formatting these numbers on a regular basis so that
more time can be spent figuring out what they mean, instead of what they are.
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| Connect the results dots or we'll never know who this is |
9. Connect the dots:
Reporting in a silo is useless. The results that your team measures and
analyzes should cross departmental, paginal, and user experience bridges in
order to get the full picture. After all, you wouldn't be able to solve a
jigsaw puzzle with just 33 of the 100 pieces, right? Your reporting system not
only should have measurement solutions in place, but your KPIs should take into
account all channels and your reporting team should understand how they
interact with each other. An obvious example of this is offline media and
website traffic; when media was running, how was website traffic impacted? Did
behavior or quality of traffic change? Did website leads increase? Going even
further, how did social media channels and/or conversation react to the influx
of messaging? None of these brand and web channels live alone, they work
together in complex, interconnected system. Your reporting should understand
that entire system and take inventory of how each channel is influencing the
others. Whether that is through user surveys, trend analysis, or cross channel
attribution, connecting the dots in reporting is essential.
10. Make it matter:
The most important part of reporting and analysis, and probably the most
overlooked, is that these reports should mean
something. What's the point of spending all of this time building a system,
pulling numbers and analyzing data if its only purpose is to tell people that
website traffic went up or down a few percentage points, and guess how much
time they spent on that page? Every piece of data and every bullet point needs
to refocus itself on the "why", as in, why should anyone care? After
that, the question is begged: "what can we do from here"? Make sure
each report ends with recommendations, next steps, timing, and key discussion
points that are all intended to improve those KPIs so that the next report's
results look even better. Furthermore, important trends and information should
be earmarked so that future strategies, whether they be media, web content,
product, messaging or anything else can be informed by historical results. In
the end, the results are the only true measure of web success.
