Web Analytics Are Useless Without Action and Accountability

Web analytics programs will reveal a lot about how your web site is performing. Programs have advanced past the stage of simply providing number of hits and unique visitors data to things like "which navigational link receives the most clicks" on any given page of your site. Now you can even learn not only where you might rank for a random phrase in a search engine but where you rank for key phrases that actually bring visitors to your site. However, all of this information is useless unless you actually act upon it.

Jason Burby explores this issue in Web Analytics: Are People on Your Team over at ClickZ News. He finds that many web teams focus on initiatives and deadlines but do not measure the success (or failure) of those moves.

Time and time again you see people get caught up in working on a big list of initiatives that have queued up, without ever really defining what success means for each individual initiative. Success is often measured by delivering something (anything!) on time and within budget.

As soon as one initiative launches, it's off to the next one, and so on. Often "there isn't time to define success metrics," and surely no time to see how the new launch did. It was, of course, nearly on time and right around the discussed resource budget.

He goes on to say that as web and online marketing budgets increase, executives are starting to require deeper performance metrics from the channel.

People on the Web team start to be asked by the group leader how they can move some of these metrics. When an initiative is launched, they may start looking at the impact of specific changes.

The main thought here is that in order for web analytics to do their job well, the web team must act on the data and be held accountable to do so.