So, you have a web analytics tool. You’ve done your research and you’re happy with the solution you’ve chosen. And you’re using your lovely web analytics tool as a campaign tracker. Only. That’s your one use. To see how well your campaigns are performing. But you don’t look at why their performance is at its current level. You just track them so that you have figures for Upstairs. Why?
This is a pet peeve of my own; people using web analytics solutions to track one landing page or to look at one report. Obviously, if that’s what someone would like to do, then more power to their elbow, but the vast amount of data and insight that is possibly being wasted by this under-usage seems like a tragedy.
What you don’t know if you track one landing page:
- what visitors did next (unless you have an exit link on the page to track)
- how to segment based on behaviour
- how to target based on behaviour
- how to improve your acquisition strategy
- WHY
Small-picture tracking is wasting opportunities – granted, this may be a usage dictated by a lack of resources, parcelled web properties, teams in silos and so on, but looking at campaigns in isolation, without looking at other influences and impacts is squandering optimisation prospects.
To be fair, working for an analytics vendor as I do, there is sometimes an in-house disconnect between the usage we had in mind when creating a feature/function/report capability and the actual way in which a customer will use it.
For example, we have a lovely array of out-of-the-box reports of which we’re very proud. We once had a customer ask if we could add an option to remove all of them as they just took up real estate in the UI after they’d created all of the custom reports they actually wanted.
We have a report called Last Visitor Details (shows individual visit paths) that we never considered to be incredibly useful because it can’t be used for trending or statistical analysis. We have customers who ONLY use this report. Therefore, I am aware that my bias may be unfounded and that if any part of a tool’s usefulness can be exploited, there are wins but..but..don’t you want to know WHY?
