webanalytics.cl

Engaging your team and getting them to share your enthusiasm for Web Analytics can be quite a challenge. Probably it won’t be easy for them to use the Web Analytics tool  deployed within your organization or to leverage their analytics skills into the appropriate procedures (WA data can be tricky).

Although it’s a big help to have a web analytics champion (If you are reading this that’s probably you!) in the team to share his(her) knowledge and speed up the learning process of his(her) workmates, it’s probably that part or most of your team would be quite apathetic or simply put just not feeling it!

How do you get Web Analytics into the workflow?

Foster a Metric (or KPI) is a simple and playful way to promote exploration, ownership and accountability over the Web Analytics data and the actions that can be  derived from it.

How do you apply Foster a Metric?

1. Establish a knowledge foundation. Take the time to make sure your team has a general knowledge on Web Analytics and also specific skills with the tool of choice. Is very important they understand any particularities  of your deployment.
2. Look at your goals and define metrics or KPIs related to them. For inspiration on metrics and KPIs you can look at Avinask Kaushik’s blog or Eric Peterson’s book. Here are a few slides on KPIs I presented last year at Practitioner Web Analytics 2009 Lisbon.
3. Assign 1, 2 or at most 3 metrics or KPIs to each member of the team, consider person’s experience and responsibilities within the organization. For example content managers are a match for content/section scope metrics and bounce rate, sales and marketing match revenue per visit, cost per visit, ROI per visit…
4. Have a 30-45 minutes session with each person explaining the assigned metric(s) or KPI(s). Where to find it in the reports? How to calculate it? How to read it? What’s good? (Increase or decrease) What drives change? Understand relationship to goals and other metrics.
5. Agree on a reporting routine. How often are metrics going to be reviewed? I recommend weekly, every other week or at the most once a month. Have a meeting where each person can present the status of his fostered metrics and his proposed actions based on his analysis and expertise to improve. One metric at a time. Finally when everybody has presented give time for an overall discussion focusing on metrics and interactions among them. Hopefully the meeting will trigger follow-up conversation on some of the suggestions given.

I hope you try to adapt the Foster a Metric program to your team. If you do it I would appreciate if you share your experience.