Pitchforks and Torches at Reddit because of 'Spammer'

Wow - I've just realised that I haven't posted anything about social media in over a year.  I'm slacking.  Then again I have posted more about social media than I have about SEO, so maybe I've been more slacking with my SEO than with my social media.  Anyway, this is a long rambling opening (for a change) so that I can tell you a bit about the goings on over at Reddit this week and what you can do to avoid it.  But before I do that - I thought I should point out the things I've written before, specifically about how you should work with Slashdot and how you should work with Digg in terms of working with the community.  One thing you should never forget though is that social bookmarking is all about networking.  To know it, you have to know the community.  To know the community you have to be in the community.

So what has been happening over at Reddit this week?  As you can imagine given the title of this post, it has been a bit of a witch hunt.  Why has it been a bit of a witch hunt?  Well it has all been about a 'moderator' called Saydrah.  But we'll come back to her later.  Really it all started with a nice young chap who used to write an online comic called the Oatmeal (including telling you how to get on the Reddit home page), but who has managed to get a deal with a publisher to get a book of his cartoons out.  "Hurray!" most of you will say, his comics were indeed funny.  However one poster wasn't quite so keen that it turned out that he used to work as at SEOmoz and that he may have been gaming the system over at Reddit (even though he had told his whole story on the site before).

This led into someone finding out that Saydrah also had a bit of a history regarding this sort of stuff, posting a self submission on Reddit explaining it and giving out all her contact details.  The difference with Saydrah was that she happened to also be a moderator, so it seemed like a conflict of interest having her being employed by a company to tell the other employees how to 'work' social media and then moderating a forum (ie deleting spam) from the very forum that the people in her company may have been submitting to.  She went on the offensive and posted a Q&A (these are called AMA - Ask me anything).  She was then accused of using her moderator powers to ban posts and promote her own above them.  However it wasn't enough, she was removed as a moderator from one of her subreddits.

To fully explain all of this, it probably needs me to talk a bit about SubReddits.  Reddit is made up of lots of categories called subreddits.  Some of these were created ages ago, but you can basically create a new one yourself if you really want to.  These subreddits then combine together to give you your overall Reddit that you can see on the homepage.  Each subreddit needs a moderator (or more than one, depending on its size) that can make sure that the posts aren't spam and people aren't putting comments into the posts that they shouldn't be.  These positions don't get paid, can't promote one post above another and generally speaking sound like a bit of a pain in the arse for little return.  There is even an Analytics subreddit (more on that in a moment).

So what lessons can me learn from this?  Well I think Saydrah probably would know more than anyone else about this (because she tells people at her company about it), but I think the word missing here is 'transparency'.  If you are doing something like this, then you probably need to make sure that everyone knows about it so that it can't come back to bite you:

"Hi, I am Alec.  I work for Business Link.  I'm a Web Analytics Manager.  I've got a vested interest, but here is something I have worked on"

You probably don't want to go about it in the way I've just said above.  However, if you're doing something in social media and it isn't immediately obvious what your vested interest is then you should be telling people.  When I am submitting and talking about BusinessLink content then I tend to tell people "I might be biased, because I work for BusinessLink, but..."  When I'm talking about my analytics, I usually go via my handle 'Whencanistop' so most people will know anyway (or will know with a cursory bit of Googling).  Of course the Oatmeal did this with all of his work and his AMA, but Saydrah was probably a bit slow in doing it.

Top tips when submitting your own content (or your companies content):

1. Do it from a branded account ID.  Seriously, people will appreciate it much more.
2. Make sure the content is unique and interesting for that community (I wouldn't submit my blog articles to Reddit, for example, because they aren't relevant).
3. Include in your submission information that you work for the company and any vested interest that you may have ("I appreciate your clicks because it generates ad revenue for my company and I get targeted on that - which is a bit screwy")
4. Make sure you are part of the community first - build up the trust, work out what they like, create interesting content that they'd like to read

There are obvious benefits to wanting to post articles on Reddit - the traffic volumes that you generate would be very useful for your ad revenue and the comments that you get back will be great for helping you create new content.

The Web Analytics SubReddit

Which brings me on to my final point.  I think we should rebuild the Web Analytics subreddit.  The Yahoo! forum we have is good, but is probably a bit clunky.  The subreddit would allow analytics people to submit blog posts (and there are a lot of them), it would allow the other analytics guys to rate and comment on the blog posts.  Plus we'd have one single repository available for all of us to communicate on.  Now all we need is a moderator that would be willing to do the task that those on the Yahoo! forum also do.  Sayrdah - you've got some free time now, do you fancy doing it?  Too soon?

Building and Measuring Keyword Footprints

Well it is Search Engine Strategies (SES) in London this week, so I thought I had better be writing something about search engine optimisation.  This year's SES has been taken over by web analytics guys (or so it would seem from the home page).  I'm a bit surprised that is has taken this long to get so many Analytics guys there, because analytics should be the basics of your SEO efforts.  So today I thought that I'd blog about something that I have been wittering on about at work for ages (although without actually getting any where with).  That is we're going to talk about keyword footprints.

Do you know what they say about the size of a dino's footprint?

What is a keyword footprint?

A keyword footprint is a series of keywords that you want to make sure that your site is optimised for.  These should be a series of phrases that uses will type into search engines, which you are likely to be able to rank for (given some work - see below) and that will provide value to your website (whatever that may be).

Really what we are looking for here are a bunch of keywords that you'd really like to (or already do) rank for that give you lots of money through sales (or whatever your other conversion points are).  High volume and high value should be the things that you think about.

My recommendation on the size of the footprint is that it should be as big as you think you are able to cope with.  As soon as you make it so large you are not actively doing anything with some of the keywords it suggests that you should rationalise it to something more manageable.

How do you build your keyword footprint?

My recommendation for this is to draw on as many sources as you possibly can:

• Use your own keywords that currently drive traffic to your site.  You're probably already monitoring these anyway, so it should be something that you can easily pick up out of your web analytics tool
• Use the keywords that users type into your internal search engine.  These are usually not quite the same as those that they type into Google to get to you, so they'll give some variations on the theme
• Use the titles of the most visited content on your site.  If you are a typical content site then this should be relatively easy to pull from your Analytics tool (although you may need to do some mapping if your titles and urls don't match each other)
• Use Hitwise to find out what your competitors are doing.  Find out who your competitors are (either through Hitwise as I've discussed) and then turn them into a custom category (either including or not including your own site, depending on how large it is).

I reckon if you did this you could come up with about 100 phrases for each of the four groups listed above.  That is going to create a very large list, but you are going to have a lot of cross over.  My recommendation is to file that list down to what are going to be a manageable group of search terms.  My recommendation is to do this in a group by inspection (rather than running through a tool).  It will allow you to notice duplication of terms and allow you to work out where you are likely to have misinterpretations (eg "Sole Trader" always amuses me slightly).  Then work out what the volume of searches for each of those search terms is.

You can do this in a number of ways.  Firstly you could use Hitwise's search tools to find out which are the high volume terms.  This is useful because it will allow you to see all the subsidiaries of that term and group them together.  The next option is to use Google's own tools in this process.  You can look in Google Trends for keywords to see how often they have been searched for and how they compare to other keywords.

What do you do with your keyword footprint?

You optimise the hell out of it.  Seriously.  What do you mean you don't know what that means?  Well let's go back to the basics.  You have to optimise your site technically first.  Go read this post on technical search engine optimisation.  You know I said that you should you should have a title, meta description and meta keywords (although these are of less value)?  Well suddenly you've just created a load of keywords that you can put into those fields.  Makes it suddenly seem very simple doesn't it?

• Put your keywords in your headers: Title tags, meta description, etc
• Put your keywords in your content: If there already - make sure they are titles, make sure they are bold, make sure they are used in context
• Create content that links to those pages with those keywords in the anchor text

Then there is the none technical stuff.  This is the hard bit.  This is the bit where you have to ask other people for links.  But fortunately you are a step ahead, because you created a custom category earlier on in Hitwise, you should be able to find those sites much more effectively.

• Use Hitwise to find out which sites are driving traffic for your search terms and ask them for links
• Use Google/Yahoo!/Bing/Whichever other search engine to find out which sites appear top for your search terms and ask them for links

This process is hard.  People don't want to give you links.  Sometimes you might have to find ways of getting them to give you links that may be unusual ("I'll give you one if you give me one").  Sometimes they just won't do it.  If your content is good though, then people will be more likely to want to link to you.

The next step is to get on out there and start commenting on blogs.  Funnily enough blogs are written by the same groups of people who own websites.  It's true.  The more you can get into the blogging community the better it can be.  I like using Technorati and Google blogs to find blogs that are on a particular subject and then I read them.  If they have anything that my content will enhance, I will leave a comment on their blog telling them so.  Usually I'll be explicit ("Disclaimer: I write www.whencanistop.com, so this may be a bit biased, but I've written a post on so and so and thought that it added weight to your argument").  These links probably won't add value directly, but they should give the writer of the blog more of a sighting of your blog and then they are more likely to link to it next time.

Create new content around those keywords.  This is something that I cannot stress enough.  If you don't have content relating to those keywords then either drop them or create some content.  Build it into your content creation plan.  Tell your writers/editors to put them as frequently as possible into their content.  Make sure you have the best content so that if someone searched for your terms they would be glad that they found you. This is all user centric - there is no point shoe horning terms into places that the user won't get value out of.

Measure the effect of your keyword footprint

Even if you are a genius your initial list is going to only be average at best.  What you need to do is a continuous process of measuring the effect of your optimisation and then updating your footprint accordingly.  I've mentioned how you should measure your SEO before, and I see no reason to stop doing this.  However for your keyword footprint I would go a couple of steps further:

• Measure your position in the search engine results page (SERPs) over time for your keywords.  You can't do this manually, it could take forever so I suggest using an automated tool
• Measure your conversions from your keyword footprint.  If I tell you only one thing today - this would be it.  You need to show that you are adding value through the work that you are doing. Measuring the money that you are making (or the additional conversions) will show that this has had the desired effect.

Some of your keywords that you have chosen for your keyword footprint will not convert well.  Don't forget that optimising for search means that you need to optimise your landing pages for conversion too.  If the keyword doesn't perform well in terms of conversion you can think about how you can alter the landing page to improve this.  Don't forget that you could do this through creating custom reports in whichever tool it is that you so happen to use.

If you think that you are spending a lot of time optimising for a phrase but aren't getting any incremental increases in conversion, then it may be time to drop that keyword from the list and start with others instead.  Remember though, you don't want to un-optimise for those keywords, you just want to move your effort elsewhere.  This may mean that you move to a sub category of your key phrase (eg instead of having "Car Insurance" you move to "cheap car insurance"), or it may mean that you move on to something completely different from your earlier list.

So in summary - your keyword footprints are a short list of keywords you specifically want to optimise for.  They are the keywords that are going to provide you with the most value over time (not just volume).  And the amount of effort you put in should be less than the increase in value you get out (otherwise you wouldn't have an ROI).

Are any Omniture reports 'Standard'?

As per usual, this post is inspired by someone else (isn't that always the way?) and it has taken me several sessions to write.  This time it is inspired by Avinash Kaushik who wrote a post yesterday on "Analysis Ninjas: Leverage Custom Reports For Better Insights!" and it got me thinking about Omniture.  It seems to me that in SiteCatalyst, you don't have any standard reports, they are all custom reports, but someone in Omniture (or in the organisation I work in) has gone around tried to make the reports standard.  Maybe what I should do is go back to the admin of Omniture and turn all the metrics on the main reports to something completely ridiculous that you would need to change in order to get any sense out of.  Standard metric for the pages report?  Why that would be 'Reloads' not 'page views'.

Anyway, whilst I could sit and rant about that, what I thought I'd do is point out some of the nice features available in Omniture that allow you to do some of the custom reporting that Avinash talks about in his posts (and it is amazingly simple).  But, first things first:

Custom Traffic Variables


These are not custom reports!  Seriously they are not.  They are just standard reports with something slightly different in them.  This is the equivalent of your 'pages' report, except you've populated it with something else instead of the page name.  Your first target with these reports is to work out the context of the reports and what you are going to do with them.  Remember these reports are not conversion based, they are based solely on your normal traffic variables: Visits, page views and Unique users (plus the associated Entries, Exits, Single Access, Time spent).

Do you not have all these metrics enabled for the custom traffic variable that you need?  Ask your account manager (you might have to pay a bit more - but nothing more compared with the overall contract).

Remember that your reports can be broken down by where people came from using the little green box next to each of your values in your custom traffic variable (remember to make sure you set up your data correlations here), however you will then be limited to having Page Views as your metric.

It's a good start that we've made here because the first thing we've done is realise that the standard metrics we want aren't the ones that are usually put on the screen.  This is something that you need to remember.  Also remember that whilst different people want different metrics, you don't need to put them all on the same report, because it will be a nightmare. Not least of all because it won't be sorted in the way that any of them want.  Create as many new and varied reports and let each person have their own one.  Give them a login, tell them to save it to their favourites.

Even better, give them a link to the report with their login details and then tell them to save it in their tool bar as a favourite.

Use the icon in the red box to create a link to their report and email it with the login

Use the Bookmark option to save a copy of the report in your header to return to easily at a later date

Custom Conversion reports

Custom conversion variables reports are not custom reports.  They have the same issues that you do with your custom traffic reports - they are all tailor made and your job is to customise them even further to give you the information that will help you make your KPIs.

Custom conversion reports are conversion reports, but you need to add in your conversions first.  Conversions are your custom events (this is getting confusing right?) and your Purchase events (which are just custom events with a name).  This basically means that as well as having your campaign reporting running separately from your traffic sources report, you can set up another X number of random 'campaign' that will run independently of each other, but can be broken down by one another.

Don't understand what I mean?  Well let me give you an example.  We collect our internal search terms that people type into the site in a custom conversion report.  We also collect when people go off and use one of our tools (as a custom event).  Because of this we can tell you if a person who searched for a search term went off and used a tool.  This is a key metric for those that are optimising the site - we want more people to use our tools (it's a sign of engagement with the site, seeing as we don't sell anything).  We can tell how successful our internal search engine is based on whether people use the tool or not.

But that information on its own, isn't quite enough.  We also need to know how many of them were searching for it, so lets use that add metrics button to give us the additional metrics we need:

In fact, I probably want to know tools used per visit, so I could create a calculated metric based on that.  Calculated metrics are great, but only in the right context.  And more importantly, as Avinash says - you don't want hundreds of metrics in the same report.  Taylor each of your reports so that it gives the person you are sending it to a few really key metrics that will help them.  If it means that they come back asking for more information then that is a good thing.

To create your own metrics is really simple in Omniture.  When you add in your additional metrics (like in the picture below) you'll see a little drop down at the top of the page and a coloured blob next to it.  Click on the coloured blob and you'll be able to add as many calculated metrics as you want into your table.  As I've just said though - don't do this.

When you're done - why not share it with another user?  This is one of the greatest things about a programme like Omniture (and Google Analytics, as shown by Avinash - plus I'm sure a whole host of other analytics solutions), you can easily share what you've been doing with someone else.  And of course, it always just seems to get easier and easier.  So you've got about four options:

• Download it in a format that would best suit the person you are giving it to and then send it to them.  Alternatively you could download it into CSV and then turn it into some nice spreadsheet.  This is my least favourite option - but it can work well if you are going to run some commentary with it
• You could send it directly to them out of Omniture - this option even allows for you to put comments into the report or some notes into the accompanying email.  This can sometimes be a nice way of doing it because you can send it in HTML, so all that formatting you created in your dashboards isn't lost.
• You can turn the report into a dashboard (as alluded to above).  This can be a one report dashboard, if you want it to be.  No time here for adding in lots of 'nice to haves' - lets keep it as simple as possible. Then you can give the person you want to see it a log in to Omniture and then show them how to subscribe to the dashboard that you have shared with them.  This is a simple way of getting them more interested in the detail - they'll probably ask you for some more information and you can then tell them you'll show them how to get it.
• You can send them a link to the report.  This new 'link to this report' feature allows you to get people who would normally pester you for data to actually log on.  No more of this "I can't remember how to find this report" rubbish.  Get them in there, if they want something more difficult they can work it for themselves.  Even better - send them a link to the dashboard you've just created!

So in summary: Create custom reports and get the people you are sending them to to log in and look at them themselves.  This will give you even more impetus to get them more skilled up on not just using the tools, but using the data behind them as well.

Integrating Voice of The Customer with Analytics data

After the last post where I got all Philosophical on you, I'm going back to my roots this week.  Partly because I spent half of last week sitting in front of the computer with a bit of writers block.  Possibly accentuated by the fact that I had a cold ("Ahhh, Alec" is what you're meant to say).  Plus I've had to rewrite this opening paragraph a couple of times every time I started afresh.  So what I've decided to do this week is talk a little a bit about what we call 'voice of the customer'.  Web Analytics is great at telling you what it is that users do on the site.  You can monitor what they search for, what pages they look at, where they came from, etc.  If you want to know why they do it though, you have to go to the next step available and ask them.

These two things don't have to be entirely independent though.  In fact, they should feed into each other in a way that is seamless.  Let's start at the beginning and see how you should use your analytics to feed into your surveys (then we'll do the more important bit of doing it the other way around).

I wrote about this (a bit) when I was talking about the EU cookies law, because someone on Slashdot was commenting that you can get your site design right solely by using this sort of methodology.  Really I want to push a bit of a point here.  Your Analytics systems should be telling you about places where you have need for improvement.  Whether that be because of a high bounce rate, or a high drop off.  To fix the problems you have two choices - you can try a continuous improvement process with lots of A/B testing.

Or you can go down a slightly different route and start asking people what they think about the process.  There are two ways of doing this - one is to hire some people and sit down with them whilst they do it.  This will get you limited sample data.  The other method is to put up a survey whilst they are there (or whilst they are bailing out) and ask them then.  These online surveys have been around for years and now many of them are free (and very easy to implement).

Online voting is a step away from asking your users what they don't like about a bit of your site - Intelligent Measurement

This very easy method of tying up the data that you are producing from your systems can give you a huge return.  Whilst doing A/B testing is useful, you need to have some ideas of the things that you are going to change.  Asking the users why they bailed out may show you that the reason wasn't necessarily because of the  wording/pictures/order, but maybe more to do with the length of the survey, etc, etc.  Really you just want to give yourself more ideas to test with.

Voice of the Customer into Analytics

The other thing that you can do with you voice of the customer is link it back in the other way.  And why not. Firstly, you need to think about where you are going to put the data and what you are going to do with it.  For example - if you want to know why a customer is bailing out of a particular transaction at a certain point, then you are going to want to have the survey as an exit survey and you are going to want to know why they left (so that you can do the stuff talked about above).

I'd always strongly suggest working out the reason for the survey first, without just plonking it on the site.  However I am well aware that many people will use the survey as a reasonable measure of user satisfaction over time, by running the same request over and over.  This is particularly true for non profit organisations where user satisfaction maybe one of the KPIs that they monitor.

What you can do though, is collect the data in your web analytics system.  Particularly with tools like Omniture where you have the ability to do lots of customisation of the parameters that you collect and insert data where appropriate.

So you have two options in Omniture.  Either you can create a whole, completely blank, new report suite and dump the data in there.  Remember in Omniture you can set up multiple correlations between your collected variables, allowing you to do some drilling down into the responses that you may not have thought was possible using the tool that the survey provider has available.  Gary Angel has quite a comprehensive method of collecting this data on his blog (so I won't repeat).

The second method that you can use, as Gary also mentions is that you can collect the data in your live report suite.  There are upsides and downsides of this - firstly you are going to be collecting page views that aren't really people viewing your site, secondly you may not have all the s_props available to be able to do this (especially if you have lots of questions).

So good I had to use the gag again

This is why I quite like the method that you can use of uploading the information through SAINT.  Just in case I didn't point it out the first time, you have full correlation ability within your custom traffic variables if you use SAINT.  This is amazingly powerful because it means that you don't have to go through the process of setting up the correlations and you don't have to worry about using up hundreds of custom traffic variables.

The downside of this approach is that you have to be able to get all the data out of your survey systems and link it back to a primary key.  This may be the step that is most tricky.  In theory it is just a spreadsheet with the primary key down the left (ie the bit that identifies each respondent) and the questions along the top with their answers in the middle.  You can then upload that back into your system using SAINT as mentioned above.  In practice, getting this data may be more difficult than just uploading it in the first place.

I'd also recommend using not just uploading the information into an s_prop, but also uploading it into one of your custom conversion variables.  To recap on your custom conversion variables - these work essentially like a series of marketing campaigns.  You input your values and then that sticks with you throughout your visit allowing any custom event (or a sale of your product) to be associated with your original variable.  These are often set up to monitor people who log in or view promotions on the site.  The downside of these variables is that you can't breakdown more than one at a time, but that's probably ok for what we are going to do.  You can, of course, use the same SAINT treatment as above on your variables if you only want to use one of them rather than one for each question.

What do I do with the data when it is in SiteCatalyst?

Well, without wanting to teach a grandma to suck eggs, there are quite a few things that you could do which could give you an immediate advantage.  I'm going to assume that your survey is a random one that is shown to the user at some point in their journey and that you are asking them questions about satisfaction and ease of use of the site (as you probably would do):

• Take you custom traffic variable data and plot your satisfaction against whether a user completes one of your events (eg they used a tool or you sold them something).  Are those that are more satisfied using your tools/buying stuff?  Why aren't the one who are unsatisfied using tools/buying stuff?  How can we show them the benefits of using tools/buying stuff?
• Breakdown your total tools used/stuff sold by not just whether they were satisfied, but where they came from.  Are you mis-selling them something on another website?  Can you contact that website and change the message?  Are the search terms they are typing in showing a different levels of satisfaction/ease of use?  Does it depend on the landing page?  Can we change the landing page?
• Breakdown each of your different types of tools/things sold by how satisfied they were.  Do certain journeys make users more satisfied?  Can you replicate those journeys on the ones that made them less satisfied?

Suddenly we are now going from a stage of knowing how satisfied a user is with the site to know what it was that was making them satisfied/unsatisfied.  Plus we have all that data in the custom traffic variable that we can play with in the normal way too.

I will add one last thing and it is very important.  User satisfaction and the use of a tool (for example) may be correlated, but this is different from causation.  A user may be satisfied because they used a tool or they may have used the tool because they were satisfied.

XKCD - making the world a bit more comic orientated

What is a Web Analyst

"Oh Alec!" I hear you saying, "Are you feeling melancholy and wondering what life is all about?"  No more than normal is the answer that you'll all be happy to hear.  It is a new year, but there is no new whencanistop out there, I am afraid.  Obviously speaking about my alter ego in the third person could be slightly new, but I'm going for the personal interpersonal touch.  If you know what I mean.  And I'm sure you don't , because I've lost it already and we're only on the first post of 2010 and already I'm drivelling in the opening paragraph.  Oh wait - no, that is normal behaviour.

Actually what has really been going on with me is a little discussion that I eavesdropped on at the end of last year (that sounds so long ago, whilst actually only being last week!) that I didn't want to comment on until I had read some of the stuff that has been going on.  So lets start at the beginning.  Or the end, as the case may be.  It started with me picking up a 'conversation' that Stéphane Hamel and Eric Peterson had been having on Twitter around 'models' (in the Business sense, not the entertainment sense :)).  To cut a long story short, Stéphane has created a model (which you can download, read yourself and then pass back comment to Stéphane as I have) which describes how 'mature' or advanced a company is with its Web Analytics.

Kate Moss (not the right sort of model in this case) - Wikipedia

The model describes through six different 'pillars' how mature your organisation is on a scale of 0 to 5 (0 being not at all and 5 being brilliant - to paraphrase).

This also led me into reading Joseph Carrabis' "The unfulfilled Promise of Online Analytics" Part 1 and Part 2.  They are lengthy reads - I'd recommend that you plan your dinner for a bit in the middle.  Yes, I was researching this during my spare time and no I should probably not have been doing.  Part 1, in case you are wondering ponders what the problem is and part 2 ponders what to do about it, using some of the methodology that is picked up by the Maturity model suggested by Stéphane (see there is a point to this).

Anyway, all the pondering led me to an epiphany and I stopped asking What is Web Analytics? and started asking: What is a Web Analyst?  This should be something that is simple to answer for whencanistop given that it is in my job title.  I even proclaim to be one in that little blurb at the top of the screen.


What is Web Analytics?


Stéphane proclaims to be able to define Web Analytics at the start of his Maturity model as:

“The extensive use of quantitative and qualitative data (primarily, but not limited to online data), statistical analysis, explanatory (e.g. multivariate testing) and predictive models (e.g. behavioural targeting), business process analysis and fact-based management to drive a continuous improvement of online activities; resulting in higher ROI.”

Which is, as he quite rightly points out, a bit of an increase on what Wikipedia says about it (although the Wikipedia article looks a bit like it has been hijacked by someone from Nielson) .  Really what we're talking about is collecting data about what people do on the site (by using a Web Analytics tool or by asking them in a survey) and then using it to improve the performance of the site.

What is a Web Analyst


So a Web Analyst (like yours truly) does stuff with that information.  What sort of stuff?  Well we take all that data from the tools, the surveys and any other source that we can find and we turn it into actionable insight (interestingly this last word doesn't appear anywhere in the Web Analytics page on Wikipedia).

A web analyst (the one on the right, the one on the left is a coatis)

So we take all that information and turn it into insight that the Business people can make their website better.  Is that all we do?  Well, no not at all.  When those Business people implement it, we then tell them afterwards whether it has worked or not. In theory, you then use a continual improvement programme of measuring and providing insight and changing.


However actionable insight relies on a number of things.  Any insight can be actionable.  One of the insights I'd probably have made about this blog very early on is that I should have put it on Wordpress.  So I should transfer it to Wordpress, copy all the content across, redirect all the links, etc, etc.  But that isn't going to happen, because the effort and time it would take me to do it isn't worth my while.  The benefits are there, but the pay back from it would probably take a long time to come into fruition.  That means that not only do I have to come up with insights that are actionable, but the benefits have to outweigh the cost quickly.

Not only do I have to work out the benefits, but I have to work out what the cost is to work out if the ROI is there.  How do I do that?  I need to have a vague working knowledge of the systems that we are going to need to change.  If we're making a change to a site, then we need to work out the Architecture of the IT, how competent the developers are (if there are any), whether it will have knock on effects, will there need to be lots of testing, etc, etc.  This means I have to have a quite detailed knowledge of the IT systems (or at least access to someone who does).

Now, I've worked out that the change I'm suggesting has benefit, I've worked out when it has benefit, how much and how long it will take to do, then there is the next step.  I have to persuade the Business that it is more important than any of the other projects that they are doing.  Not least those pesky ones that nobody knows how long it will take, how much it will cost and what the benefits will be.  When you're working with numbers, you can be very precise about the benefit.  When you're suggesting that you turn your logo into a dancing hamster, you can make it up as you go along, because nobody will be able to argue with you through numbers.

So we've got to know:

• The information to provide the insight
• The IT infrastructure and how to alter it (plus all those processes that always go off in IT)
• The Business framework (how you can get funding)
• The current projects so that you can push your project

Basically, it turns out you have to be a Business Analyst as well as a Data Analyst.  No wonder people are getting disenchanted.  Web Analytics may or may not be hard.  Being a Web Analyst is hard.

ps - would you have ever thought you'd see a picture of me and Kate Moss on the same blog post?