3 Questions with Avinash Kaushik – Understanding Your Analytics
Through his blog, Occam’s Razor, and his best-selling books, Web Analytics: An Hour a Day and Web Analytics 2.0, Avinash Kaushik has become recognized as an authoritative voice on how marketers, executive teams, and industry leaders can leverage data to fundamentally reinvent their digital existence. Kaushik puts a common-sense framework around the often frenetic world of web analytics and combines that with the philosophy that investing in talented analysts is the key to long-term success. He passionately advocates customer centricity and leveraging bleeding-edge competitive intelligence techniques.
I asked him a few questions about his upcoming session at SES Toronto 2012 in June:
1) You recently wrote that you love the quote “To guarantee success, spend 95% of your time defining the problem and 5% of the time solving it.” Please elaborate on the the biggest mistake website owners make in defining their analytic challenges?
The biggest mistake is not defining their web analytics challenges (we have more than we want of it). The mistake is not defining the purpose of their analytics efforts.
We have so much data on the web, almost all of it available for free, that we dive into the the data ocean hoping that magically awesome things will follow. They never do.
So my recommendation is that before you ever touch SiteCatalyst or WebTrends pause and figure out what the purpose of your analytical efforts is. What are your digital business objectives? What exactly is your acquisition strategy? What are the primary purposes you are trying to deliver against on your site?
Identify the purpose. Create a Digital Marketing Measurement Model. Then go after data.
I share a lot of specific guidance on how to do this in a recent blog post: The Biggest Mistake Web Analysts Make… And How To Avoid It!
2) Most people have access to web analytics tools but don’t fully make use of them. What are some of your favorite metrics that digital marketers can quickly leverage and pique their interest in doing more with their own analytics?
Here are some of the metrics I’ve called super lame, as they do not deliver material insights: Page Views. Impressions. Clicks. Time on Page. Even Visits.
Here are some of the metrics I’ve called super awesome, they are harder to measure but deliver a level of actionable insight that is bottom-line impacting: Days & Visits to Purchase. Assisted Conversion Rate. Economic Value. Share of Global Search. Task Completion Rate.
3) You’ve written about the “So What?” factor when it comes to measuring the value of one’s social media efforts. Please highlight a couple of those key social media metrics that brands should be focused on.
Most social efforts can be categorized as “Like quest,” or to put it more crudely: “Please please please validate my existence and click this Like or Follow button!”
The problem is that for most brands and companies this is almost completely disconnected from any business impact (short or long term).
I like using data to drive optimal behavior by companies. For social channels I’ve defined four metrics you can measure ascross all social channels to ensure that 1. You are participating in and optimal manner and 2. You are creating a long term asset for your company.
The metrics are: Conversation Rate, Applause Rate, Amplification Rate and Economic Value. I’ll be presenting this in my keynote in Toronto.
To learn more and hear him speak, check out SES Toronto 2012 in June - I’ll be there so if you’re planning on coming, drop me a note and we’ll meet up!
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Before assessing web analytics, ask yourself "what are my digital business objectives" http://t.co/AhteMGT7
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