In advance of the upcoming Search Engine Strategies conference and exposition in San Jose, California on August 18th through the 22nd, Website Magazine's SEO Expert Dante Monteverde posed some questions to Avanish Kaushik about analytics and his upcoming presentation. Avinash is the author of the recently published book Web Analytics: An Hour A Day and the Analytics Evangelist for Google.
As a thought leader Avinash puts a common sense framework around the often frenetic world of Web research and analytics, and combines that with this philosophy that investing in talented analysts is the key to long term success. He is also a staunch advocate of listening to the consumer, and is committed to helping organizations unlock the value of web data.
How to Choose a Web Analytics Tool: A Radical Alternative. It essentially outlined these steps for ensuring that you pick the right tool for you:
- Step 0: Assign optimal ownership. (Day One)
- Step 1: Implement a web analytics solution. (Day Two)
- Step 3: Teach yourself the limitations of web analytics, tagging, numbers not matching, need to go redo your website IA / URL's / ID's / Cookies / data providing facilities. (Day 17)
- Step 4: IT "rules"! Cross your fingers, dive in. (Day 27)
- Step 5: Do a honest and deeply critical self review of where you are. (Day 57 or infinity)
- Step 6: Celebrate.
I also feel that people don't do enough of an accurate self assessment before they pick the tool for their company. I address that by providing three (and only three) questions that any website owner should ask themselves before they start the selection process: Web Analytics Tool Selection: Three Questions to ask Yourself.
My recommendation is to always start by answering this humble yet difficult question: "Why does your website exist?" Identify the macro and micro conversions you are driving. Then start looking at your data and now your efforts will be focused, they will impact your business bottom line and, most of all, you'll know which mountain of data to ignore in your quest for success. Here is a post that has specific examples of Macro and Micro Conversions.
Kaushik: Most Web analytics tools used to (and many still do) rely on the page view, or more accurately fake page views, to track rich experiences. Google Analytics had released a feature called Event Logging that allows you to track Ajax, Flash, Flex, Video, Stream Audio and all such matters using a new and scalable model to collect data. This means no more page views but also a great deal of additional flexibility in what you want to collect and how you want to report on it. There is more information here: Event Tracking Overview.
