In looking back through many of our posts on analytics the topics can seem pretty complex, especially if you are just now working towards becoming a data driven organization. Becoming a data driven organization is a huge step in the right direction, but it is just the first of many steps.

Nate is detailing the process for creating a data driven business culture in his recent post. But I want to take a step back for the companies who are not there yet, to provide a high level road-map.

Here are the necessary steps:
Decide to become a data driven organization
Get buy in from the necessary parties
Decide whether you have the staff to devote to analytics in house or if you should outsource
Get educated
Implement a free solution
Start analyzing
Understand that the initial findings will likely not be very impressive

Step 1 – Decide to become a data driven organization. Realize that most marketing departments are now, or very soon to be, held accountable for justifying their budgets, proving ROI. The upside of this is when you can prove ROI it makes getting approval for increased budgets much easier.

Step 2 – Get buy in from the necessary parties. Read more about that here.

Step 3 – Decide whether you have the staff to devote to analytics in house or if you should outsource. Studies have shown that as far back as 2004 companies who have a dedicated analytics resource (or resources) outperform those who don’t.

Step 4 – Get educated. There is a lot to learn when comes to analytics; what products are available, which product would be best for your company’s need, how to implement the product, how to use the product, what the numbers mean and what to do with all of this information

Step 5 – Implement a free solution. You can sign up for a free Google Analytics account. As long as you have the ability to put java script on your web site, you can start seeing reports in just a few days.

Step 6 – Start analyzing. Just do it. Start looking at the reports, reading the explanations of what they are showing, look at the charts and graphs that are available. The more you time you spend with this information the more sense it will make to you.

Step 7 – And this also is a huge step, understand that the initial findings will likely not be very impressive. Unless you happen to be very lucky the first numbers that you see may not be very ‘feel-good’ numbers. You may have a high bounce rate, a low average time on site, conversion rate and ROI may not be very positive. Don’t let this dissuade you from becoming a data driven organization. Once you start to pay attention and understand the data you can use it to improve. And the quicker you begin, the quicker you can improve.

Next week: Taking your analytics to the next level

In Website Magazine’s latest issue, there’s an article about landing pages, and how when someone lands on your page as a result of an organic listing, the landing page should serve a different purpose than when someone lands on a PPC landing page. I respectfully disagree with the statement that, “the methods and goals are radically different.” Landing page goals are to drive visitors through a conversion funnel to a desired action, regardless of organic traffic or paid traffic. The methods used to create the user experience on an SEO landing page is marginally different than the methods used to create the user experience on a PPC landing page.

And I respectfully disagree that “SEO pages tend to be website home pages and very general in nature.” I don’t know whether the author intended to write “organic listings” as opposed to SEO pages, but the truth of the matter is that you can (and absolutely should!) optimize more than just your homepage. It is important to try and rank your important pages and build new ones that can rank for relevant, targeted terms, and write descriptive meta tags (which are still used by search engines) in their SERPs for describing your pages. You can rank subpages for terms, and not simply your homepage. In some cases, you can rank both your homepage and a subpage in top rankings, not to mention that site links allow for more subpages to get attention than simply your homepage.

According to the author, “SEO-oriented landing pages must be more general and less action-oriented.” I disagree. SEO landing pages must be optimized to be action-oriented, and must NOT be more general in nature than a PPC landing page. Next time you’re building SEO landing pages, remember that organic listings may in some cases favor homepages, but that optimizing subpages for more specific key phrases can still get you competitive rankings that drive visitors to action upon arrival at your site.

Back in October, I indicated it was important to move beyond monitoring reputation management and develop mechanisms and key performance indicators in the analysis of those monitors. I said that “A mistake may hurt a person or company, but other issues may reveal systemic problems that will only continue and potentially snowball into even larger concerns.”

Today, I’d like to describe why this analyzing is important. Say you’re a car manufacturer, and you sell lots of cars in one line. This line is not the most popular car on the road, but profits are healthy, crash testing ratings are solid, there are no recalls, no defects or workmanship that keeps your cars in the shop, and people are buying the latest model because they like the small design changes and improvements you’ve made over the previous year model that may still be on the lot.

Then, out comes a report that this otherwise fantastic vehicle line was the most stolen vehicle in the previous year. You’ve secured the shelf space on your brand, and the news won’t break into your branded search terms (though it may appear in the news results of universal search), but the news is also appearing on MSNBC online and offline, as well as car enthusiast blogs, forums, and all across the internet.

How do you respond, or do you not respond at all? This is where internal processes must be prepared for determining the threat level of a reputation problem. Is being the most stolen vehicle going to hurt sales? Or is it an indication that your car is popular and has attractive features? Or is your vehicle simply easier to break into than other vehicles? Quickly assessing what the report may or may not mean, and its shelf life for impact on your brand should guide the decision on whether to respond and engage.

What would you do?

Changing a business culture from one that is based on gut instincts to one that is data driven is not easy, but with hard work and perseverance it can be accomplished. This is the first in a two part series that gives a basic framework for how it can be accomplished. Each company is unique and the internal politics will play a large role in how a process like this can be accomplished, but if you follow the basic principles in these posts you should be well on your way.

In order to entrench web analytics into the decision making process and transform a company into a data driven company you will need to be careful in the steps that you take. It is vital to have complete buy in from senior executives down through each department and the stakeholders that will learn to incorporate web analytics data into their decision making process. Because of that, you will need to take a three tiered approach in beginning to educate employees and gather the necessary information to help each stakeholder. It would begin with the executive team, then move down to each of the department heads, and finally each stakeholder within each department.

The process should begin by bringing the executive team together since they are the ones who guide the direction of the company. If they do not currently understand web analytics, you will need to explain to them how it will empower the company to move from a company that has relied on gut instincts to one that relies on actual data to make informed decisions. It should be more of an overview and educational meeting since they are likely to not care about all the fine details, but instead will be interested in understanding how moving to a data driven business culture will help the company grow and become more profitable.

The next step should be to get each department head together in a meeting. It is probably best to first meet with all of them at once to give them an overview of web analytics that was similar to what was done with the executive team. With the department heads, however, you should also go into more details of what you will need from them in order to make the transformation as seamless as possible and how you are there to help them make their departments more efficient and improve their departments’ contributions to the success of the company as a whole. You should make sure they understood that you are not there to make any department look bad, but instead to help them all work together to make their departments and the company as a whole as profitable as possible by incorporating hard data into their decision making process. Once you met with them as a whole you should then go and meet with each department head individually.

During the individual meetings you should discuss any reservations or issues that they have regarding web analytics and the data it will provide them. You should be sure to fully answer each issue that was brought up and make sure that they are reassured that changing their departments culture to one that is driven by data will help and not hinder their department in the long run. Another critical aspect to help the department heads engrain within each employee is a willingness to embrace change and not fear it. Mistakes will occur in the process, but as long as everyone learns from them you will all come out ahead of the game and continue to grow the company. This is especially true when testing various tactics on the site. They need to understand that it is ok to scrap a test that required lots of resources and go back to the original if the data shows that it is not working.

After each department head fully understands and has bought into the new culture that will be developed you should then find out from each of them who the stakeholders are within their department.  The next step is to go and meet with each stakeholder. That will be discussed in the second part of this post.

A recent article in Investor’s Business Daily opened with the following:  “Warning: If you’re seeking job security, don’t think about becoming a chief marketing officer.”

I would revise that warning slightly: If you are interviewing for the CMO job, take a hard look at two things before you accept:

1.) What is the organization’s analytics infrastructure? You can’t consistently score home runs without good data.  Unfortunately, while the demands for CMO performance are increasing, investment in the analytics that are necessary to create high ROI marketing programs often just isn’t there.   The CEO wants to know why marketing isn’t thinking outside the box, experimenting with the latest and greatest new channel or tactic. Meanwhile, marketing can’t even get budget approval for upgrading their Web Analytics tool to a current version. It’s a train wreck for a CMO.

2.) Is there a “culture of analytics” within the organization?  Even when the tools are there, data often gets ignored (turf wars over budget and power, etc.) or someone at the top is too impatient to wait for it.  (As the article rightly notes “The Street, CEOs, boards need short term wins…).   In other words, intent is different from action; deciding is not the same as doing.  CMO candidates would do well to ask a lot of “why” questions about an organization’s current marketing program and results before accepting the job.

It is such an exciting time in the world of marketing and communications.  I’m shocked by the amount, quality and sources of data available to drive good marketing decisions (not to mention all the new channels and tactics to choose from).  What is perhaps more shocking is how hard it is sometimes to drive adoption (real adoption) of the tools available. 
 

So taking last week’s post a step further, there are some real benefits to approaching analytics as a discipline not just a chore or task that you do once a month .

The book “On Intelligence” (2005, by Jeff Hawkins & Sandra Blakeslee) explains, among other things, how we learn. Information and experience get “pushed down the cortical hierarchy. The more you are exposed to certain patterns, the more the memory of these patterns are re-formed at lower levels. This allows you to learn the relationships among higher order abstract objects at the top.”

What this means is as you spend more time regularly looking at web reports and doing the analysis, the basics will get ‘pushed down the cortical hierarchy’ and become second nature. This will allow you to be able to think about the analytics at a different level and really take a deeper dive into what it all means.

When you first start analyzing data or looking at web reports, it may seem very complicated and you may not understand it at all. But if you can discipline yourself and make it part of your schedule to regularly take time to do the analysis, things will get easier.

The more time you spend the more you will understand. When you understand the basics, then you can delve a little deeper. You’ll start to recognize patterns that you never noticed before. And if you are really disciplined and get continue to spend time regularly doing analysis your understanding of what the numbers mean and what you can do with this information grows even greater.

As the book says, “It’s the essence of expertise. An expert is someone who through practice and repeated exposure can recognize patterns that are more subtle than can be recognized by a non expert…..Experts can recognize patterns on top of patterns.”

Planning is a cornerstone of any business, to be able to identify what work needs to be completed, who needs to do it, and how long it should take them allows you to identify resource issues, plan for scaling, and determine if you’re actually making money on a project.

In the past I’ve used MSProject, Excel, multiple whiteboards (it started with a single whiteboard, then scaled up to 3… when we started to run out of wall space), BaseCamp, and none of the above.  Currently we’re using ClockingIT, the first benefit of this application is that it’s free… yep, that’s right, no cost, just like that apache server you’re using.

ClockingIT was developed by a married couple in Oslo, Norway.  Like Apache, the source code is available, should you desire to do some development work on it yourself, and contribute to the community.  So what does it do?

• Time tracking
• Milestones
• Task Dependencies
• Timeline and activity log
• Notifications – email & RSS
• Multiple language support
• Individual user security settings
• Integrated wiki

What about the concerns?  Well, the server that they host it on is based out of their employers ISP, this could be an issue should their employer no longer be their employer.  Again though, you can take the source code and install it on your own server should that be a major concern for you.  Another concern is the development cycle.  What happens when you identify an issue that is important to your business?  Well, in our experience, if it’s been something that improves the product, it gets in there fairly quickly.

So far, for us, ClockingIT has provided everything that it said it would, at a price that anyone would like.

The big news, is that Microsoft is looking to purchase Yahoo for $44.6 billion. While there is often a focus on MSN’s Live.com lagging in the search space, and desperately needing Yahoo’s ad inventory to come even remotely close to Google’s search share, there is one thing that is almost always missed in the analysis of the ongoing “Microsoft needs to buy Yahoo” saga, which has been rumored since before last May, when it first came to light as more than just a theory.

The truth of the matter, is that Yahoo can also be helped by a purchase or merger of the two. While Google continues to push hard into the online services and online desktop space with their offline reading capabilities, not to mention Google Docs, Microsoft and Yahoo have been a bit slower in this area. But that’s where I see Yahoo loving what Microsoft has to provide, and that is Microsoft Office Live. Yahoo would immediately be able to push forward into the online desktop and services area, and may be able to further expand their Yahoo! Small Business hosting and stores as a result of integrating more documents online.

Will the Microsoft-Yahoo deal go through? I’m not holding my breath, but I do think it would be mutually beneficial and not just a coup for Microsoft in the advertising world.