Five Keys to Successful Web Analytics with Partners

If you’re a web ana­lyt­ics pro­fes­sional at a large com­pany, you may have to work with sev­eral ad agen­cies or other part­ners that are respon­si­ble for man­ag­ing dif­fer­ent aspects of your online mar­ket­ing ini­tia­tives (dis­play ads, paid search, SEO, social media, email, web design, etc.). If it’s chal­leng­ing to man­age web ana­lyt­ics across just inter­nal teams, it can be even more demand­ing when you add exter­nal par­tic­i­pants to the mix. If you want to become a truly data-driven orga­ni­za­tion, you can’t limit your web ana­lyt­ics gov­er­nance efforts to just your inter­nal teams. If your part­ners are strate­gic to your busi­ness, they need to be a part of your web ana­lyt­ics focus.

When my kids invite friends over to play, they are expected to abide by the same “house rules” as my chil­dren (e.g., pick up toys, no fight­ing, no bad words, etc.). As a par­ent, it’s hard enough to get my own kids to pick up their toys con­sis­tently, let alone get­ting their friends to do so as well. Friends that repeat­edly don’t observe these rules are not wel­come in our home, and our kids are encour­aged to find new friends to play with. Part­ners which are not will­ing to abide by your web ana­lyt­ics program’s stan­dards should be changed for those that will. You need to extend your web ana­lyt­ics pro­gram to include your part­ners in order to be effec­tive as a data-driven orga­ni­za­tion.

Are you work­ing with the right partners?

Before I get into some spe­cific best prac­tices for work­ing more effec­tively with agen­cies, you first need to eval­u­ate whether you’re work­ing with the right part­ners. A data-driven part­ner will not bom­bard you with lots of mean­ing­less met­rics — they mea­sure the per­for­mance of their adver­tis­ing efforts based on appro­pri­ate met­rics or KPIs. Some ad agen­cies are still uncom­fort­able with the “t” word (trans­parency) and fil­ter the results. When­ever alter­na­tive met­rics are used in place of the expected KPIs, you know some­thing isn’t right. Your spi­der sense should tin­gle when you hear some­thing like: “The con­ver­sion rate on the last cam­paign wasn’t as good as we hoped for, but the view-throughs were through the roof!”

You want to work with part­ners that embrace trans­parency like an overzeal­ous Care Bear. These data-driven agen­cies are aware of your key busi­ness goals, under­stand your KPIs, and are closely mea­sur­ing the suc­cess of each cam­paign against those key met­rics. Along with increased trans­parency comes the client-agency under­stand­ing that some fail­ures will occur along the jour­ney. With­out full trans­parency, part­ners and clients will not learn from these bumps in the road and can need­lessly waste adver­tis­ing dol­lars. Data-driven agen­cies learn, improve, and max­i­mize your ad spend.

Data-driven part­ners also approach mea­sure­ment con­sid­er­a­tions at the begin­ning of a project instead of rush­ing through them at the end. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen sit­u­a­tions where a client’s agency is scram­bling to add tag­ging the day before a website/campaign launches. Would you rather buy a new car from a man­u­fac­turer that approaches safety from the very first design of the car or one that scram­bles to include safety fea­tures on the pro­duc­tion line?

Best prac­tices for ensur­ing web ana­lyt­ics suc­cess with partners

Many enter­prise clients have asked our con­sult­ing team for best prac­tices in work­ing with mul­ti­ple ad agen­cies and other part­ners in terms of web ana­lyt­ics gov­er­nance.  In our expe­ri­ence, there are five key areas that can make a big dif­fer­ence in how suc­cess­ful our clients are with their agency part­ners. Even if you’re only work­ing with one part­ner, many of these best prac­tices still apply.

1. Train­ing and Certification

• Ensure all agency part­ners have been trained on Omni­ture prod­ucts and are cer­ti­fied Omni­ture part­ners. The exper­tise of the agency web ana­lyt­ics staff can vary greatly from part­ner to part­ner, and Omni­ture cer­ti­fi­ca­tion can be a good yardstick.
• Reduce your ros­ter to a smaller group of cer­ti­fied part­ners. Work with your inter­nal teams to see how the active list of agen­cies or part­ners can be consolidated.

2. Doc­u­men­ta­tion

• Require a Busi­ness Require­ments Doc­u­ment (BRD) for all projects, which includes tag­ging needs. Most part­ner projects will include a BRD, but many times mea­sure­ment require­ments are not fac­tored into the busi­ness require­ments gath­er­ing and definition.
• Pro­vide a cor­po­rate stan­dards doc­u­ment to part­ners so that they know what stan­dards are in place and why they are impor­tant to over­all mea­sure­ment efforts.
• Cre­ate a process guide with clear instruc­tions on the entire process from begin­ning to end. This doc­u­ment can come in handy if you’re work­ing with a new agency or need to for­mal­ize the process with an exist­ing agency. It will help with estab­lish­ing clear expec­ta­tions for both sides.

3. Sin­gle Point of Contact

• Des­ig­nate an inter­nal con­tact per­son who is famil­iar with the tools and stan­dards to field all ques­tions from agencies.
• Require a sin­gle point of con­tact from the agency side as well. If there’s an issue with the tag­ging which needs to be cor­rected quickly, you need a des­ig­nated go-to person.
• Hold weekly or bi-weekly meet­ings to coor­di­nate efforts across dif­fer­ent agency projects.

4. Qual­ity Assur­ance / Sign-off Process

• Require agen­cies and inter­nal IT teams to per­form QA on all tag­ging — both from a tech­ni­cal per­spec­tive (e.g., data is being col­lected) and busi­ness per­spec­tive (e.g., data is sound). In addi­tion, make sure that any new mar­ket­ing ini­tia­tives (includ­ing test­ing and redi­rects) do not inter­fere with cur­rent site tags or implementations.
• Build val­i­da­tion of imple­men­ta­tion and report­ing into the final sign-off process to ensure spec­i­fied busi­ness require­ments have been met.
• Struc­ture your part­ner con­tracts so that post-launch changes or enhance­ments are not painful to exe­cute. Rather than wait­ing for a cam­paign or web­site to run its course before ana­lyz­ing the results, it can be valu­able to make opti­miza­tions mid-stream in order to drive greater over­all success.

5. Account­abil­ity

• Hold agen­cies account­able for non-compliance with stan­dards or poor qual­ity of tag­ging. Lost or bad data trans­lates into missed insights and opti­miza­tion oppor­tu­ni­ties, and part­ners need to be aware of the ram­i­fi­ca­tions to the business.
• Hold inter­nal groups account­able for not fol­low­ing the estab­lished process for agency engage­ments. The part­ners may be will­ing to fol­low a defined process, but never learn about it from the rogue inter­nal teams they are work­ing for.
• Cre­ate alerts to catch poten­tial cam­paign or web­site tag­ging issues early. A thim­ble of good data is bet­ter than a bucket of bad data.

If most of your online mar­ket­ing exe­cu­tion is han­dled by part­ners, your orga­ni­za­tion will need to build part­ner con­sid­er­a­tions into its web ana­lyt­ics pro­gram. You can’t ignore the fact that ad agen­cies and other part­ners can make or break your ana­lyt­ics suc­cess. In order to achieve your goal of becom­ing more data-driven as a mar­ket­ing orga­ni­za­tion, you’ll need to work with capa­ble, data-driven part­ners. Using the right part­ners and the high­lighted best prac­tices, you’ll be able to achieve new heights in web ana­lyt­ics awe­some­ness and more impor­tantly greater suc­cess with your mar­ket­ing efforts.