Death by Data – 5 Ways You Can Misuse Analytics and Damage Your Website
Analytics can be the guiding light for your website marketing program. God gave us analytics so that we could make better business decisions based on data, and not intuition. But so many companies lose themselves in the analytics fog. Data analysis can also spell disaster if not implemented effectively.
Don’t let your website marketing program die at the hands of those who were entrusted with protecting and improving it.
Here are some symptoms that precede the “Death by Data” syndrome:
- Shooting Arrows in the Dark. Every time a marketing team sets “goals” for a search marketing campaign based on their guts instead of quantitative research, an angel dies in web heaven. Not to get celestial on you guys, but really….only realistic goals will be measurable. Not setting goals that are in line with industry metrics is a sure shot way to set up your website for defeat even before it ever gets a fair chance to compete in the market.
- Clicks versus Intentions. Many of the top analytics programs present you with a click stream, but this is just the initial part of the larger picture. Clicks do not tell you the single most important thing: What is the intention of your website visitors? Don’t fall in a “click trap,” where the number of clicks is final measurement of success. Conversions, revenue, and understanding customer behavior are the real insights that will help you improve your website’s health.
- Data Lipstick. This one is especially relevant to larger corporations, where the format of the report is more crucial than the content. This is particularly sad, because larger organizations have the manpower to actually make a difference if they can overlook political issues and fears about job performance. Job insecurity transforms reports into a means of making a point rather than contributing to the overall health of the website. Putting lipstick on terrible data will not help you improve your website. Stop refining the report format and massaging the data – start using the data to make a difference.
- Powerless Employees. Behold the analyst with not an ounce of empowerment. Why hire an Ivy League graduate to do daily math and process senseless data for you? Data is not just to be added subtracted and divided several times over by a reporting robot. Make every ounce of data count toward analysis, and give people in your organization the authority to make data-driven decisions.
- Analysis paralysis. It’s heartbreaking to see over-analysis of website data. This kind of endless cycle often results in a website that appears to be in perpetual change although nothing is really happening. Over-analysis of web data is deadly because the website and your website visitors are changing every hour; decisions that are debated and discussed ad nauseum will not have their desired effect because a new set of visitors are now your targets. You cannot hit a moving target, cannot bring January strategies to March. The biggest fear is: What if we are wrong? Well, if no action is taken, then you will definitely not win anything and you risk killing your website at the through inaction or delayed action.
Timely diagnosis and a strong dose of common sense are key in preventing the death of your website. However, even if you find yourself in this malaise, thankfully there is a cure!
- Make Data-Driven Marketing Decisions
Oh, and if your team has come up with a ton of remedies for helping your program and none of them include this cure, consider what Anton Chekhov once said:
“When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it can’t be cured.”
