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Keys to Web Analytics according to Jim Sterne

Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, Editor-in-Chief Web Marketing Today Rocklin, CA
May 30, 2007 - 12:32:00 PM

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Jim Sterne

Emetrics Summit conference organizer and Internet marketing pioneer Jim Sterne kicked off the conference May 7, 2007 with a keynote entitled, "Website Measurement Ecosystem." As the Summit progressed, I found myself thinking back often to some of the things he said. I'm not trying to condense his whole keynote, but pick a few points that stood out to me.

He mentioned the 10/90 rule, for every $10 you spend the tool, you spend $90 on the people to use the tool. My observation is that small and medium enterprises (SMEs) may end up paying for excellent web analytics tools, but seldom are willing to pay for the personnel to make the data understandable, actionable, and strategically important. Small businesses must find ways to hire the personnel, probably as very part-time consultants, so that they can leverage web analytics (see "An Analytics Consulting Model for Small Businesses," http://www.wilsonweb.com/analytics/wilson-consulting-model.htm).

Jim also spelled out four helpful keys -- "tricks of the trade":

1. Make your visitors successful. Nobody wants what you're selling. The purpose of web measurement is to figure out who is coming to your site and then help them to be successful in finding and doing what they desire.
2. You are not the target audience. Your boss is not the target audience. You're not building the website for yourself. Often the boss or site owner will make decisions based on his or her own preferences. Wrong. This is all about the visitor, the potential customer. What the visitor prefers can be determined by testing and that should be the focus of the site, not the preferences of the one who has the power in the company.
3. The winner is the one who asks the best questions. What is the problem? What are the root causes? How might we do such and such? To succeed we must learn to ask the question behind the question. To me, this point exposes a huge weakness of SMEs. We don't have people tasked to study our website analytics so that can even formulate the right questions. So we go blindly on without questioning, thinking that the status quo is good enough. In the short term we can get away with it. But in the medium to long term this will cause us to fall behind, and perhaps not even maintain the sales we do have, much less continue to grow.
4. Experiment. Sterne quoted Einstein's famous saying: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different outcome." The way to improve is to try new things -- hopefully things prompted by questions raised from studying data from our site.

I came away from Jim's keynote with a clear conviction that we small businesses must embrace and invest in web analytics -- especially personnel, probably consultants, who are trained to analyze, ask the right questions, suggest some promising experiments, and then test to see which of these experiments will lead us in the right direction.