B2B/B2C online strategy and enterprise eBusiness blog

Here I sit, the end of day #3 in Orem, UT, in my hotel room preparing for a final day of Omniture web analytics training. Information overload is an understatement after spending 9AM-5PM talking about web analytics and how to use the Omniture tool. By no means is this Omniture’s fault, there is just so much information to think about and crafting the correct strategy for how you send data to any web analytics tool is a time-consuming challenge in itself. Because you can literally track anything you dream up, the takeaway from this week’s training is to focus on the business objectives, and then craft your analytics strategy from there.

Here’s a list of steps which was provided in training this week which is helpful for anybody getting into analytics or revamping their approach to analytics on their site:

1. Define conversion paths. A “conversion” is a KPI (Key Performance Indicator), or in other words, a business goal. If you’re an e-commerce site, an order is a conversion. Your business goal may be to increase top-line revenue which will translate to increasing the number of orders and/or average order value.
2. Find holes. This is a critical step in monitoring conversion paths. If 100% of your traffic is reaching step 1/5 of your checkout process, but only 5% are making it to the final step 5, then you’ve got a problem. Identifying the holes in your conversion paths can uncover technical issues and/or usability issues with your site.
3. Run a detailed analysis. What exactly are the scenarios in which only 5% are converting of the 100% of traffic that starts in the funnel? Run additional analytics reports to see if you can mine any additional data that could shed light on the issue.
4. Hypothesize. If the detailed analysis doesn’t turn up any obvious technical issues, start evaluating from a usability standpoint. Why is the fall-out happening?
5. Test. You’ve got your hypothesis, now test it. Repeat steps 2-5. This is a never-ending process!

This is a very straight-forward list of items to follow when evaluating each of your conversion funnels on your site. Get the basic funnels down that align with your business goals, and then worry about the deeper-diving reports later on when you’re comfortable that your analytics strategy is correctly implemented. Tools like Omniture’s Data Warehouse make it very easy to go back and re-evaluate data in the event that you add an additional conversion funnel to align with new business goals or to track something you might not have thought of during your initial analytics implementation.