A call to arms?
This post was made Mar 05, 2009 by Jeff Noethen
In a perfect world analysis would be easy. If you checked your data and your conversion was down versus the previous time frame, your page abandonment was up and your customer approval index was down (or you might have a spike in negative feedback), you would have a pretty clear picture that something is wrong with your website/page. But more often than not, the stars do not align like this. You may see that conversion was down but your page abandonment was actually lower than the previous time frame (which is generally viewed as a GOOD thing). This can make the question, “What does this mean,” really interesting.
How do you make sense of all of this? Unfortunately, there’s not yet a good wiki for web analytics. Sure there are books written that may help, but how often do you find the exact answer for your exact problem? For that matter there’s not a lot of concrete information or ‘word problems’ posted in forums that I’ve checked into. It seems we are still too afraid to share real experiences or real findings or real problems when we need to figure something out. I understand that privacy issues often come into play, but sure there are alternative ways of explaining a scenario without giving away critical information about your company.
I constantly grapple with making sense of the data when there’s not one clear pathway of answers. But I enjoy the challenges of researching answers and coming up with what I feel are the answers and solutions for each situation.
It shows us though that there’s still so much to do and learn and know about web analytics. It is also probably the reason why you won’t find a plethora of universities teaching this discipline just yet. I sometimes wonder what the great philosophers would have been able to accomplish if they would have had the world wide web at their fingertips while they were developing their theorems.
I guess the point of this blog is a bigger community and better communication. As analysts we should not be afraid to ask the questions that we don’t have the answers to. Sure it should start with your boss or your coworkers but they won’t have the answers every single time. In this Wild Wild West time of Web Analytics we can’t always be gunslingers and lone rangers. We must build something together in order to make it better.
There is a community of analysts out there and they are doing great things. I just hope that they keep the door open to anyone who has a mind and wants to contribute, or just has questions that need to be answered. Fledgling forums are around and / or starting up and I encourage you to participate and engage when and where you can. I would love to hear from you regarding the forums that you participate in or that you find interesting.
