“What’s the Headline?”: Finding the News in Web Analytics
Your analytics tool is not only installed and working—it’s optimized and delivering data the way you expected. All the reports are in place and you trust the numbers. One of your key report recipients even told you the interface was easy to understand. Yet you still feel like something’s not quite right. Sound familiar?
You’re not alone.
Here’s what often happens once analytics is “up and running”: First, everyone is excited that it’s working at all (those implementation experts we hired really helped out!). Then, folks are happy that their campaigns are running somewhere close to expectations; and that as new sites are added, the tags are in place and key data isn’t lost. Then another month rolls by and the reports are pretty much the same. Sounds good, right? Everybody goes about their business. And then in the third month—same thing. By the fourth month, people start losing interest. And by the sixth month, only the dedicated analysts are looking at the data.
In fact, by the sixth month, the dedicated analyst may be looking for something interesting to talk about. It may take them a long time to find it. And when they do find something interesting, its most likely going to be something that changed.
Here’s what’s wrong: repetitive data is boring. It’s boring because it isn’t useful.
What’s useful is news. News is about what changed. When something changes, it means something better is happening than before, or something worse is happening than before. And in either case, there’s usually something you should do about it. And isn’t that the whole point of analytics? To find news you can use?
How can you find that stuff quickly? Often it may be buried. Think about report number 87, day 16, line 21. That’s where the news is hidden that in Korea (let’s say), a local news program featured your product and there was a major spike in traffic to that product’s page. Did it make top 20? No. And therefore, you might never know about it.
Along comes a product called Dynamic Alert. It’s made by my company, Technology Leaders. Dynamic Alert is pretty simple. It watches all of your existing analytics reports—every data point for every day—and “alerts” you via email when any of those data points have exceeded its historical norm. Then you can look at a chart of the data point in Alert’s own interface, or go right to the analytics tool and look at the report itself.
Alert is not a “thresholding” tool. We’ve seen those: you decide which reports you want to be told about, and how high or how low they can go before you care. Thresholding tools are okay if you have the time to set them for each and every report you really care about (and as long as its only a few). But Alert specializes in digging deep all by itself and mining nuggets out of the data and showing them to you. And you pretty much don’t have to do anything to make that happen.
Okay, that was a sales pitch. But the industry really needs a way to cut through the information avalanche and give users a way to focus on what’s important—what’s actionable. What changed.
If a product like Dynamic Alert can help out, that’s a good thing. And if you end up using a great alerting tool, you may find yourself well ahead of your competitors who are still trying to find report number 87.
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Andrew Edwards is a founder and former boardmember of the Web Analytics Association. He is a founder and a Managing Partner at Technology Leaders, a New York City-based web analytics consulting company.
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