Analyzing web analytics
Couple of days ago I finished the last of this season’s speech and seminar tour. As usual, it’s been a whole lot of fun, but I’m glad I can finally get back to focusing on actually doing stuff.
So, for the first time in a while, I managed to get some reading done and scoured thru a couple of web analytics books that has been in the pipeline for a while. Best one, by far, was “Actionable Web Analytics”, which was the only book focusing on why we should analyze and what to actually do with the numbers, compared to just describing the mechanics how we set up GA or Omniture to output some stuff.
What surprises me the most is how I can’t find a single decent approach to analyzing advertising campaigns that aren’t driven by click-thru. This still seems to be a blind spot, despite the fact that everyone is a metric evangelist these days.
It’s all very web site centric, although GA announced support for distributed apps thru their Flash tracker the other day. Also, the customer analytics vendors have in mind are clearly advertisers or publishers, possibly media agencies, but definitely not creative agencies.
There are simpy no decent tools for creative agencies to use to actually improve the quality of their work. Throwing stuff like KPIs or OKRs at creatives just don’t do it.
So sure, we need our creative briefs to become more data driven, but where are the tools to make us do that? Campaign analytics tools are mostly tied to ad serving vendors, making it very difficult for agencies to learn stuff cross-clients since the data is siloed. And what’s up with the CTR, especially using it as a measure of success for banners with a simple message, such as “This is an ad for diet coke, please buy it”… sheesh. Just because CTR can be measured doesn’t mean it’s relevant.
And also, how difficult can it be for ad serving vendors add plug and play tracking for exposure time, hover, non-CTR events etc etc.? And how come there’s no dead easy way to get insights on what frequencies, media context or individual characteristics (geodemo or psychographics) what seems to trigger different types of responses?
Gah, do I have to create everything myself? ;)
