• by Judah Phillips , October 16, 2009

Companies are more dependent on solid Web analytical data to drive increased revenue and improved efficiency than ever before.  Yet, most companies underinvest in the people and technology needed to deliver optimal levels of analysis.  In my discussions with colleagues at industry events, it is not uncommon to find one analyst or a very small team of fewer than three analysts responsible for everything related to Wweb analytics, from soup to nuts.  And by that I mean all vendor relationships, systems administration and maintenance, tagging specification/verification/QA, AB and multivariate testing, data collection, report creation/interpretation, stakeholder communication, and all analysis activities. 

That's a lot for any one person or any small team, and it's why one analyst in my network called himself out as a "tortured soul."  I appreciated his hyperbole, and started thinking a bit more about why that could be.  He does it all and feels the pressure of doing so.  I am sure that is not an uncommon feeling for the most junior analyst to the most senior analytics manager.

 Companies need to commit significant resources to truly maximize the benefit of Web analysis.  Having one part-timer on the side or a couple full-timers doing it all may cut it at very small companies with simple requirements, but at large companies with complex platforms and detailed data and analytic needs, it truly does take a village of analysts -- and maybe even a city of supporting functions -- to get the job done right. Assuming you are staffed to deliver, what else does it take to turn the torture into pleasure?  Allow me to suggest a few things:

 

Thecorrectplan.  What is the plan?  It's the desire and the sequence of events necessary to carry out a specific action or set of activities.  Specify what the plan is in writing, evangelize it, get stakeholder buy-in and remain true to it.  A high-level plan could be something as generalized and simple as, we support releases against the predefined release schedule, focusing on new and changing components of the release. Or, the deliverables we provide are X reports and the analysis we provide will focus on these metrics and KPIs and be delivered within Y days.  Or a plan could be highly specific, such as the one my good friend Eric T. Peterson wrote about in his whitepaper on multivariate testing for a company named SiteSpect. 

Therighttechnology.  I am a firm believer in a single source of truth for online data.  That single source may be made up of unique, nonredundant data pulled from multiple systems, such as your enterprise data warehouse, audience measurement tool, and Web analytics system.  This ideal is often unrealized -- leading to the nightmarish torture called "data reconciliation."  Or in other words, my WebTrends says this, while my Unica says that, and my Omniture (ahem, Adobe) says this and that. Which one is right?  While we all know the answer to that question is "yes,"  it's a hard sell to people who aren't immersed in web data; explaining it all can be akin to the torture of Kafka's harrow.  I've said it once, and I'll say it again: there is no FASB or GAAP for online metrics, no matter how many organizations publish standards.

 Adequate supporting teams.  The teams outside analytics that support the function either contribute to the twisting of the Rack or the picking of the analytics flowers.  Teams such as development, QA and pperations each have their own demands and needs that if not properly catered to can lead to challenges.  Development puts the tags on the pages to the more they understand how to do so, the better.  QA should be helping test your tags and their correct execution. The more they do, they more the analytics team can focus on what it is supposed to do: analysis, not QA.  Operations will provide tool and infrastructure support.  The more they handle it, the less time your team will spend administering and configuring the underlying hardware or tools, and the more time spent on analysis. 

 At the end of the day, the right combination of all these elements in your business will yield success with analytics. With these in place, the tortured soul becomes almost blissful.