Web analytics

Ben Mein, director of web analytics at Nielsen Online, looks at how a solid understanding of web analytics and its metrics can be the key link to understanding how a business can maximise return on investment…

If the current financial squeeze gets even tighter senior digital managers are likely to place a greater focus on return on investment (ROI). The story is similar: “You need to continue to produce the same performances but you’ve got less budget from last year to do it.” To understand how you maximise ROI, you have to understand the interactions between the business objectives, key drivers and the measures within the digital business to know how to get positive results.

And this is where the holes start to appear in the fabric of management ability to meet digital ROI objectives.

The rapid growth in digital media meant a scarcity of experienced people which led to a large influx of both junior and senior resources from other areas of media, and in some cases, from non-media backgrounds. By the nature of its growth, the digital industry needed this influx to sustain it. All of a sudden everyone is ‘digital’ but digital is quite different to other media. To have a true understanding of how it works there needs to be an inherent interest in how consumers use the technology that is driving the industry and how this technology can change the proposition of what a digital business first intended. For example, a broadcaster can transmit a 16:9 picture format safe in the knowledge that the widescreen TV receiving it will render the exact same image. This is not the case in digital media as the plethora of browsers consumers use can significantly screw up a lovingly-crafted website! Equally as important is the understanding of how technology affects the metrics and tools that measure consumers’ interaction with this technology. It would be fair to say that newcomers to digital media have an unenviable amount of information to learn and assimilate in a short time frame to deliver positive ROI. The fact is there are still many key managers of digital operations that do not yet fully understand the insights these measures can provide to meet their ROI objectives.

Within web analytics, common questions by key managers give away this inherent lack of understanding, such as “What is a unique visitor?” and, “How does a page view differ from an impression?”. But should those questions really matter? Maybe it’s more important to ask questions about what insights are derived by looking at unique visitors or which metrics are important to use and when, with regard to gaining insights needed to meet objectives. After all, what matters is gaining maximum insight into visitors’ behaviour and characteristics that really derive the valuable information needed to meet ROI objectives. Unfortunately, it is the lack of understanding of web analytics and its metrics within businesses that means its value isn’t often appreciated enough. For example, many companies still run regular reports across departments that only show trends of page views, unique visitors, top ranked pages, etc, etc …yawn. There are KPIs in place that don’t have a connection to the objectives that are trying to be achieved.

So what do these reports tell the business? Not much. Where’s the story? What do these trends mean? Why are they changing? These are the questions that really matter. Hence, understanding the use of these measures becomes the key link to understanding how the business can maximise ROI. Therein lays the true value of web analytics providers and their tools to a business. Much of the information that can be gleaned from enterprise-level web analytics tools typically goes unused, and this can seem an expensive excess to what managers in businesses are trying to understand at a more basic level and achieve for ROI. So it could be said it is not the size of the product that matters as much as the way in which it is used. Thus, web analytics spend in many companies – both in value and time – is probably significantly below where it should be, and the true value of the web analytics provider, its service and not so much the tool, is not sought often enough.

A recent study stated that about one-third of organisations are planning to increase internal spending on web analytics staff. Is this a wise move in a time when many organisations are reducing headcount costs? Surely a more efficient way would be better use of web analytics providers’ services to help understand how to develop web analytics insights throughout the business.

So how can service providers help? For example, Nielsen Online is, first and foremost, a research company; it is not solely a technology-led web analytics vendor, but it does use a range of technological tools to help achieve its goals of providing analysis and insight in the digital media. Moreover, it can also link its digital information with other traditional media information to create cross-market, cross-platform, and cross-media intelligence. In essence, it can provide a full view of consumers’ behaviours in relation to their media environments. Why is this important in a time of one of the worst economic outlooks in 80 years? It supports clients in many more ways than just providing media monitoring tools. The real benefit is providing businesses with the analysis and insights based on the years of experience of its people working with clients to turn data into actionable insights. This is vital to clients who are looking to place their restricted budgets against suppliers who can help provide as much understanding as possible to help deliver the ROI required for their organisation.