Don’t Do This! 7 Pitfalls When Deploying Analytics (Part I)

Ana­lyt­ics can be like a kid in a candy store…when a com­pany sets off to put a new ana­lyt­ics sys­tem into place, they get so excited about all the things they’ll be able to mea­sure that they for­get many vital ele­ments they need to think about before ever deploy­ing the plat­form.  Here are five com­mon pit­falls that I see com­pa­nies fall into again and again. Avoid­ing them can make for much smoother sail­ing as you go about your imple­men­ta­tion and ensure you can get your candy and eat it too!
Pit­fall #1. Neglect­ing key stakeholders

It often hap­pens that the per­son who plans for and over­sees the imple­men­ta­tion wants to own it and be sole keeper of the data. Whether this stems from a mis­placed desire to shield oth­ers from any extra work that might come up around the imple­men­ta­tion or from a wish to be ruler of the data king­dom, it will cause major problems.Websites touch all facets of an orga­ni­za­tion, so a web ana­lyt­ics deploy­ment should reflect all facets of the orga­ni­za­tion. Every­one needs to be involved. This is no longer 1997, when a web­site was run as a closet ini­tia­tive.  Not get­ting require­ments nailed down at the out­set, from all con­cerned, can lead to big problems.

Pit­fall #2. Focus­ing on tac­ti­cal requirements

When deploy­ing an ana­lyt­ics pack­age like Omni­ture, you must under­stand your strate­gic busi­ness require­ments — that is, what you, as a busi­ness owner or stake­holder, will need from the ana­lyt­ics.  What strate­gic ques­tions do you want to answer? And by strate­gic I do not mean how pop­u­lar a link may be on a page…that is tac­ti­cal.  Strate­gic ques­tions are directly linked to your company’s strate­gic ini­tia­tives. So start with your company’s 3 or 5 key pri­or­i­ties – as out­lined by your CEO – and then deter­mine what ques­tions you need to answer to sup­port those.  Every com­pany I have work at or worked with has had 1000 dif­fer­ent things they want to do with their web­site, but it’s amaz­ing when you apply a lens of strate­gic CEO goals to these ini­tia­tives, how few are actu­ally rel­e­vant.  It’s a pow­er­ful yet sim­ple approach to pri­or­i­tiz­ing. For each project, just ask your­self – “how does this sup­port the goal out­lined by my CEO?”.  If you can’t clearly answer that ques­tion, you’re prob­a­bly deal­ing with a tac­ti­cal require­ment and some­thing that is sec­ondary to your deployment.

Pit­fall #3 — Believ­ing “data” equals “requirements”

As you go through the strate­gic require­ments gath­er­ing process, bear in mind that your require­ments are not the same as data.  When asked what your require­ments are, your instinct might be to say, “I need hits, I need time spent on page, I need num­ber of vis­i­tors…” Those are all met­rics, and quite frankly, all three of those are ques­tion­able in their strate­gic value.A require­ment is a busi­ness ques­tion you want to answer.  The met­ric is the gauge by which you answer that ques­tion (aka your Key Per­for­mance Indi­ca­tor).  For exam­ple, if you are dri­ving a car, the busi­ness ques­tion may be “how fast am I dri­ving?”  The imple­men­ta­tion of a speedome­ter (report) allows you to answer this ques­tion. And the met­ric of miles per hour (or kilo­me­ters per hour) allows you to deter­mine how fast you are actu­ally going. But just say­ing you need a miles per hour report doesn’t help because you haven’t estab­lished the busi­ness question.

So to sum­ma­rize, under­stand your man­date at a high level, and then artic­u­late the steps you are tak­ing to hit that goal. If your goal is to improve con­ver­sions, there are a num­ber of things you’ll try in order to achieve that: you may redesign your nav­i­ga­tion or improve your reg­is­tra­tion process or make reg­is­tra­tion optional.  The data you need will fall out nat­u­rally from know­ing your requirements.

Pit­fall #4. Not focus­ing on KPIs that are specif­i­cally tied to the goal.

If you think you have 20 or 30 key per­for­mance indi­ca­tors, then you don’t under­stand the con­cept of KPIs.  Think of the dash­board of your car.  There are many data points you can gain by look­ing at the dash­board, but there are only three or four that really mat­ter.  If you come up with dozens of met­rics that you absolutely must have, you’re not focus­ing on your true busi­ness goal. I can guar­an­tee you that.This doesn’t mean that you can’t mea­sure other things that are sec­ondary KPIs — but it does mean you don’t want to focus on them right away.

When imple­ment­ing an ana­lyt­ics pack­age, above all else you want to ensure that your KPIs are mea­sured.  Don’t waste time on non-strategic mea­sures.  Ask your­self this: if your CEO was stuck on an island and you could tell him only three things about your busi­ness so he would know the busi­ness was healthy, what would you tell him? If you said the aver­age time spent on a page was 1 minute 30 sec­onds, that tells him noth­ing. If you tell him your aver­age rev­enue per visit was $2.00 and you had 2 mil­lion vis­its, that is some­thing he will under­stand as a true mea­sure of busi­ness suc­cess.  There is so much oppor­tu­nity to mea­sure ini­tia­tives and improve on them based on four or five met­rics that you can keep your­self busy for months and even years.  Don’t fret about mea­sur­ing every lit­tle last detail. You’ll make your­self crazy and you won’t be sup­port­ing your busi­ness goals.

My next post will address three more pit­falls. Stay tuned!