Thursday was a great day the XChange conference. With a keynote moderated by Eric Peterson that included four of the founding fathers of the web analytics industry. Participating were Brett Crosby, Matt Cutler, John Pestana and Bob Page. The discussion looked back at the history of the web analytics, discussed the current challenges of the industry and speculated about the future.
The keynote was followed with a series of huddles, small group discussions on various topics. I participated in two of those discussions, the first huddle being "Using and integrating online surveys and customer feedback with web analytics", led by Russ Rueden from Kohler. There was great discussion and the biggest take away for me was that the integration of various customer experience analytic data presents a huge benefit for organizations and allows organizations to take their analysis capabilities to the next level. Another take away was that it is harder then it should be. The successful integration of various customer experience analytics continues to be a focus of ours at ForeSee Results with many successful integrations under our belt.
I also participated in a huddle on the topic of "Creating a metrics driven organization" that was led by James Robinson from the New York Times. There was great discussion which led me to jot down a list of things you can do to help your organization become a metrics driven organization.
- Make sure your metrics have great credibility - your organization and your management needs to be able to trust the quality of the metrics.
- Provide proof and evidence that your metrics are accurate, precise and reliable. Also make sure your metrics are predictive of the future.
- Evangelize the value of metrics at every chance you get. You may need to "sell" the value within your organization, not only to practitioners but also to management.
- Teach others how to use metrics the "right way", not only as a scorecard but also as a tool for identifying improvements.
- Have metrics that provide actionable insights on how to improve not only your metrics, but your business.
- You need to get buy-in and consensus on the metrics you are using.
- The metrics need to be in support of the organizations goals and objectives.
- Focus not only on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) but also Key Success Indicators (KSIs). Make sure your have metrics that define success.
One of the great Key Success Indicators is the satisfaction level of your site visitors. Satisfaction will influence their loyalty far more then a visitor simply completing a task on your site.
We also had a great discussion on the org structure to support a metrics driven organization. My opinion is that there is no right or wrong structure. Centralized and de-centralized web metrics functions can both work. In fact, my recommendation would be to re-organize often, maybe as often as every 12 to 18 months. Why re-organize? Well, there are benefits of centralization such as best practices, consistent methods and tools across the organization, etc. And there are many benefits of de-centralized such as better integration with the business goals, more buy-in to use not only as a scorecard but also as an improvement tool. By reorganizing the function, going from centralized to de-centralized and back again, you force your organization into gaining the benefits of both centralization and de-centralization.
