During one of the Social Media conferences I had attended some years back, many digital leaders spoke about the values of analytic's and how under-emphasizing the same within large Multinational Corporations can be dangerous. Fast forward into today’s world and you will see that most companies understand the value of web analytic's and have it in their plan. However the right materialization of analytic's within organizations is questionable. While the basic analytic's always get implemented they are never used as much. Why does this happen? Why don't businesses value analytic's to level they should? The answer is three fold:

Implementation: Follow a business driven web analytic's strategy Communication: Share data based on the team/person its being communicated to Integration: Extend to a digital intelligence framework

(Disclaimer: the below solution although applicable to all is detailed within the context of large organizations)

Implementation

To get your implementation right, analytic's implementations must always be founded on Business Goals not IT goals. You cannot achieve relevance in the data being populated if it’s not related to the business.

The organic sales target of a company should serve as the starting point of your implementation strategy. Use historic data to settle on an achievable organic sales target through your digital strategy and that would be your web analytics goal. Next identify what it is that helps generate organic revenue for your company through your digital footprints. If its eCommerce, then it’s pretty straight forward. Anything in the lines of lead generation, improved user experience, higher net promoter scores etc gets tricky. However in either case first identify the Macro trends for that goal and build your strategy on that. It's essential to understand that while it’s important to follow Marco trends, the micro trends within each macro trend is equally important to track as they are lead indicators to your macro trends success or failure. Your Macro trends are your KPI's. Example:

Macro Trend: User Experience

Corresponding Micro Trends: # Sessions + Bounce rate + Average time on page

Communication (or Presentation)

The one metric that all employees understand is money. Always translate your traffic into a dollar value and then present it. This helps reduce jargon's and most importantly will push employees to ask questions. This approach also helps teams identify ROI for any digital investment. The practical execution of this will not be easy but definitely has its benefits. Once implemented, a few tips on communicating this out:

Reporting - Previously I used to be a fan of automated reporting and while it has its benefits, the true story of analytic's can come out of a custom built report only. Invest in building out personalized reports based on the audience.

Bench-marking - Always benchmark your data either with your industry peers. If similar data does not exist or cannot be attained, benchmark with historic data. Benching helps give the users perspective.

Metrics - Start with basic numbers, explaining each metric. However don't stop there, combine 2 or more metrics to show the bigger picture.

While the above approach is a very effective way to communicate analytic's, if it’s not possible, stick to communicating information from your Macro trends and up only.

Integration

This to me is something that’s very much undervalued in keeping numbers relevant. In today’s world of the cloud and connected everything, funneling analytic's across every user touch point opens up a whole new world of opportunities. Joseph Stanhope from Forrester was the one to use the term ‘digital intelligence’ on his blog which is pretty much multi-channel analytic's but more in-depth.

This approach forces businesses to look beyond just traditionally lead channels and pursue more. In a closely coupled digital strategy the changes within 1 channel would impact user behavior within a few other channels as well. Aligning analytics to the overall digital strategy of an organization helps identify new opportunities and fill existing gaps.

The extended insinuation of this step is better user path analysis, predictive analytic's and targeted marketing to name a few.

If organizations are able to approach analytic's within this framework, the result should be a better usage of one of the most powerful marketing tools (not IT).

The above details are a quick summary of my experiences of making analytic's work. Getting the right leadership to drive this through is vital and is something that needs to be top-down.