Last month we looked at 'Ensuring Data Accuracy' within your Google Analytics profile. To summarize this post, there is little to no point reporting on data which doesn’t accurately reflect what your true visitor is doing on your site. I cannot stress enough the importance of continually reviewing your data quality to find ways to improve.
This month’s tip is the next important item in the analyst toolbox and will hopefully reinforce the whole purpose of web analysis --- improving online performance! We should always be mindful of this overall objective when we analyze. It is all too easy to spend hours looking at the technicalities of analytics or sifting through impressive data sets but achieve very little in the way of providing business benefit.
My point here is to “Provide actionable reporting so that website/marketing executives and business owners can make informed decisions.
How To Create Actionable Reporting
Executives usually want the high level information. They need to make decisions that improve their business and most will do so quickly and easily if there is clarity in what they are reviewing. This is the real challenge for analysts, what we are paid for, and the difference between a decent and great service.
Here is the process I follow in providing actionable reporting for yourself or your client.
1) Understand the analysis process
Talk the talk, walk the walk, but truly understand why you are talking and walking!
In order to understand why results show up as they do and speak with authority and credibility you need to grasp how data is recorded into profiles and the nuances of why it is not always as expected. Additionally, you really need to be working within a process or framework to be able to data pattern properly, find insight and report this effectively over time.
I don’t want to get bogged down in technical descriptions of analytics nor processes in this post. I’m keeping it high level and hopefully actionable :) There are a plet