Reports/Dashboards v Analysis v Training

Was it a little white rabbit that used to complain that there was so much to do, but so little time?  I can't remember whether it was or not.  Cleary though, I have forgotten what I said two posts ago about writing introductions to my posts that mean that people using Bing are likely to see.  Nevertheless, it does bring me on to an interesting topic of conversation that has been floating around in my head recently.  As an Analyst (or an Analytics Manager actually) I routinely have loads of different things going on at once, requested for by various different people.  Invariably the first thing that people want to see is some sort of reporting and/or dashboard.  I hate this.  I, of course, am a highly skilled analyst and you want me to create you a dashboard.  Why?  Because I am the only person who knows the system.  Ah, now we are getting somewhere.

Dashboards and Reports

I am not going to sit here and tell you management reports and balanced scorecards aren't useful.  They are, because if you go about doing your job of making more money and the people up high don't know about it, then you aren't going to get the recognition you deserve.

Almost three years ago (hey that's a long time ago in this industry) Avinash was posting about the seven steps to creating a data driven culture.  He blogged about a presentation that he'd given (that must be where I started copying it from) and he talked a lot about HiPPOs.  These are the Highest Paid Person's Opinion.

Courtesy of Bostom.com

So if you are having to get the highest paid person to agree to what you are doing, the best way to do this is to give him the facts.  Tell him the KPIs of the site, give him the information that he wants to see, subsidise it with your analysis.  This brings us seamlessly onto:

Analysis

This is vitally important for your site.  Data alone is nothing.  Giving data to your Senior managers is not very useful - they don't know what it means most of the time.  They are going to spend half the time guessing and then you end up coming out of your data driven society.

So you provide analysis with your reports and dashboards.  This is clearly a step in the right direction.  Everyone agrees.  Shall we move on?

Well no - because Analysis is ok, but your senior management may  be happy to know why something has gone up or down, where the increase/decrease in traffic has come from, but it doesn't really tell them what to do.  You are a highly paid professional analyst.  You know the ways that this can work in your favour because you've seen it before and you have the full history behind you.

What you need to provide are recommendations.  The Grok has been writing about this recently in a post entitled Too Much Data vs Actionable Insights:

Yet rather than looking for a pilot or investing in flying lessons, many business owners buy into optimization efforts based on sophisticated data gathering capabilities and overly complex testing methodologies.

Why would they do that when they need more actionable insight and situational awareness, and not more gauges to look at?

Because flight instructors are in short supply. And because this kind of sense making, as a so-called “soft skill,” has always been a more difficult sell than hard-core data collection and taguchi testing.

He has identified some real problems in our industry.  There aren't enough people who know how to look at the instruments to provide the necessary reports.  If there aren't enough people to provide the necessary reports, then there aren't enough people to produce the necessary analysis and actionable recommendations.  Our industry has a real problem with this, to the extent that nobody really ever knows what department Analytics should sit in.

Training

I want you to search for Web Analytics in Google (or whichever your favourite search engine is).  Look at all those companies who offer web analytics solutions.  I suppose that is ok, when you type in something generic like that you expect to see a bunch of companies that sell stuff.

Now try searching for web analytics consultants.  What do those consultants offer to do?  Mainly they offer a service that allows you to get them to come in, make sure your analytics is set up properly, like the Grok mentioned before, and then would do some analysis of your site.  Hopefully giving you recommendations along the way, backed up with insights.

(please don't shout at me consultants, I'm being very general here to get a point across)

Now try searching for web analytics training.  Are we missing a trick here?  All these sites are training course for people to become Web Analysts.  What about the training for people who just need to have a handle on it for their jobs.  Where are the 'an hour a day'?  I don't want to go on a training course to find out all the extensive uses of my analytics tool, how to code it and set up dashboards.  I'll get an analyst to do that for me.

So what do we do?  As Analytics people we have to be evangelists not just about how cool it is that you can do this stuff, but we need to be able to go out to people and teach them how to do the basics.  I may not be a premier league footballer (far from it as a lot my friends will testify) but when I wander out on a  Saturday afternoon as an amateur, I've been persuaded to do it by the Premier League (ok fine, I started playing before the premier league, but you know what I mean). 

How do we do this? 

1. We need to go into our organisations and tell them that simply getting us to produce dashboards isn't enough.  Nowhere near enough.  We aren't the person to do all the work, we need to get insiders in the company to do it.  Whether this be by creating a super group of users that can help where needed alongside their own jobs; doing training courses within the company to teach people how to use the data as well as how to find it; generally becoming an open company in terms of data
2. We (the web analysts) need to get our vendors to be open about how they collect data, what data points mean and how they can be mapped across tools.  If I am having teach new metrics as well as new ways of finding the metrics, then point one gets lost somewhere
3. We need to get out there into the companies that don't have the right people in place to create the dashboards and teach those how to do it.  This means we need to go out into conferences and speak.  Not web analytics conferences, not usability conferences, not search engine optimisation conferences, but Business conferences.
4. Of course we need to continue all the excellent blogs out there detailing how to use each of the tools and how to use the data.
   

Was that a bit of a rant this week?  Sorry if it was.

Should Publishers charge for access to content?

I keep updated on the world of online publishing because, well, because I can.  And because I used to be involved in the whole thing until the beginning of the year.  So it hasn't escaped my knowledge that Rupert Murdoch has decided that he is going to charge people for access to his content.  I've written about this before at the turn of the year when I discussed the business models available for publishers.  Option number two was for the paid content where I actually said:

The only way around this is either to have news that nobody else has ... or information that isn't publicly available.

Fortunately to save me from having to repeat loads of things that have already been published, Adam Tinworth has a nice little round up of what the blogs and other papers thought of the idea.

But I think the best piece I have read so far on this has been Simon Jenkins in the Guardian.  And I think that he has hit the point on the head really well (even if the people commenting on his post didn't really get what he was saying).  Back to this in a moment.

Firstly lets see what Murdoch does:

Will he go for the model of putting everything behind a pay wall and then charging people to see it?  Presumably he'll come up with a model of how you can pay for this set of content based on a months subscription, a year or a pay per view.  If he does this then he'll have to ensure that nobody can steal his content and put it on their own website, because you wouldn't pay for something on his websites that you could get for free elsewhere.  The other downside is that his audience is going to go down massively because he'll get no traffic from search engines (or very little - he's effectively cutting off his long tail).

Will he go for the model of putting some content that is unique behind the pay wall and letting the rest be free?  The so-called 'Freemium' model means that you can still attract the audiences to your high profile content and then you can try and sell the premium stuff to those that want to get the extra.  It's a controversial model - you'd actually have to make sure what you were offering in the premium section was worth paying for and you'd have to make sure your free content dovetailed well into it so that you can sell more of the premium stuff.  This would mean you'd need a team of trained analysts working around the clock to find the best links from free to premium to increase conversion.  It's unlikely the journalists are going to be able to do this (given that half of them just plonk their hard copy content onto a web page with little thought).

So what is the value add of the content?  Well look into this from the top.  What does News Corp own?  Well look at that list of newspapers.  That isn't what is interesting me though.  What is interesting me is the list of TV companies and channels (t)he(y) owns.  One of the arguments that we always give (I gave it in that quote up there) that people won't pay for something they can get free elsewhere.  How did BskyB get so many people watching it.  They stopped anyone else using it for free.

Now if you think that in this country we have BSkyB with 9 million users.  Recently Sky has started offering live television for subscribers through their own feeds on sky.com.  What if Murdoch started supplementing its articles from The Sun or the Times with video from Sky.  Available to Sky subscribers for say £1 more a month.  You have Sky?  You get the Sun for free for a month and when you read about your football results, we'll give you the highlights as well.

In the US there is Fox News.  Why not link in Fox News with the New York Post?  You have a load of additional journalism that you can throw in for free.  Whilst other Media companies are starting to pick up content as and where they can, this could be more and more important for News Corp, because they produce it all themselves.

This leads me back to my point from Simon Jenkins earlier.  He says in his piece:

I was once asked by a streetwise Californian what business I was in. When I said I wrote for the Guardian, he looked glum. "Great brand," he said, "pity about the product."

He also says:

Newspapers should not be investing in fancy printing presses but in the "long-tail" economics of live enterprise, with the printed word as a mere core activity.

Is he on to something here?  Is he suggesting that if Newspapers want to survive they shouldn't be just looking at their core journalistic view.  As he points out that music makers now only really make money out of live performances, will journalists start to only make money out of selling what they are good at.  Where once you could make money by being good at creating music, now you have to be good at selling it to particular audiences as well and doing it live. 

If Journalists could once make money by being good at writing, then maybe now they have to be good at selling it to a particular audiences as well and doing it live.  You need to be knowledgeable on your subject, you need to know your audience and you need to be able to do it all in real time.  Maybe Simon was really implying that whilst Journalism is dead, really we should be paying people to blog.  How would that work?  Maybe Rupert Murdoch is about to show us all. 

This won't sit well with traditional journalists though, where writing was the forte and not knowing their subject matter inside out.  The other trouble is that it may be too late, because most of the blogs are out there for free anyway now.

Microsoft Bing doing Yahoo!'s search

Normally the prose seem to flow from my fingers (well it seems like that to me and I don't care what you think so there :)), however this week it doesn't seem to have quite worked out like that this week for some reason.  Don't know why.  Maybe the creativity has finally drained from the bones.  Anyway, this is all off topic.  Way off topic.  The big news this week is that Yahoo! has finally given in to Microsoft and let them take over their search results.  Is this really big news?  Well it isn't really in this country (the UK) because we don't really have much market penetration for Yahoo! or Bing, but in the US it is different, according to Hitwise (

Interesting here if you go back to the original post from Hitwise where they were monitoring it, in the States it really shows the different audiences who use Bing compared to Yahoo!  What is Bing getting here? They are getting a younger audience to come and look at their search results.  Younger people tend not to like Microsoft that much because of the long associated bad press that it gets, whereas Yahoo! is really a portal for young people (look at the sort of questions asked on Yahoo! answers and you'll know this to be true).

Moving back to the UK then the situation is much less obvious - we still predominantly use Google UK, whilst the second most used engine is Google international.  Bing and Yahoo! are small players in this market - but of course that is the sort of thing that could change quite easily.  Although if you read what the Guardian say, then this is unlikely to change soon and Microsoft have picked the wrong fight.  Indeed if the market share is only 7% in the UK for combined Yahoo! and Bing that means that many UK websites just won't make any changes at all.

However, as mentioned in the US, it is all completely different and given that my blog is fairly Intercontinental, I am going to talk about it anyway.  One of the real problems for me is that I don't get any search traffic from anywhere other than Google:

 

 

Although this does beg the question of why - so lets look at some of those Google Search terms first:

 

Well this is some interesting data going on up here - I do rank well in Bing for some search terms (not many). And bearing in mind I am looking at the UK version of Bing (I can't get the international version) it seems I should be getting more traffic.  Clearly the people using Bing as a search engine aren't really interested in what I have to offer.

I haven't included Yahoo! in this comparison, by the way, because if they are on their way out, it should have no impact on the table anyway.

However this isn't surprising - Microsoft announced not that long ago they were closing their analytics tool named 'Gatineau' down.  But that is odd, because Yahoo! have just spent great expense buying and developing their own Analytics tool.  Would it now seem that Yahoo! are going to try and use their analytics tool not to get users to spend more on adwords as Google has, but to help focus on some of their more core parts of the Business?  When I blogged about this not long ago, I said that Yahoo! needed a USP to sell it and suggested that the Merchant solutions was an option.  However since then there has been the launch of the Yahoo! Web Analytics Consultant Network (launched to web analytics people - not sure who else it has been aimed at, but time will see).  If Yahoo! is going for the small to medium size businesses will they be able to afford the cost of a consultant for a small time?  Will the consultants do analysis or is the network for those that can offer implementation advice?  If it is the latter - why isn't it easier to implement in the first place?

So this leaves me with the question -  

What is different about Bing than Google that could have an effect on my site and what am I going to do about it?

1. Bing has some interesting stuff to it.  One thing you'll notice from the screen grab below when you search for whencanistop is that as well as getting the teaser information for those just browsing the results, there is also a bit more for those hovering over a link:

So the number one thing I need to think about is how I get some interesting text in there.  It stands to reason that this is probably going to include the first bits of text.  On the home page that is good because I want to have a bit of information on what is going on with my site - who I am etc.  For none home pages when the user is searching for something quite deep into the site and gets up one of my posts, I really want some information about the post.  So maybe for the individual post pages I should take that comment out and have my first paragraph as a descriptor.

2.  Of course the above point means that I should start writing better first paragraphs.  I fear that it may be a bit late for this one, but maybe in the next one I'll do that.  The other disadvantage of this is that all my old posts start with mainly nothing to do with the post itself and more to do with what mood I was in when I wrote it.  I'm not going back to rewrite 70 different posts, so they'll just have to stay the same.

3. I need to find pages that rank well in Bing and see if I can get myself on them.  That is something that you tend to do with Google quite naturally.  In fact, in previous posts I have talked about finding people who also write about the same subject and commenting on their posts to drum up interest.  If there are different blogs sitting on the top of Bing, then I need to start reading those ones too.

4.  Not worry too much.  Seriously - if you think about it you write your posts to generally be search engine friendly, not Google friendly.  You're trying to get the write topics to write about and persuade other people to link to you.  Whilst this is advice from Google, it should also stand you in good stead with Bing.  Overall - write interesting, informative, original copy and you'll rank for those subjects.  I'm after a real niche audience here - I'm not after a load of porn search terms.

That's it.  Any more advice for me?