I was reading benry's great post on communicating analytics results, and it got me thinking about how web analytics professionals actually get their messages across inside the organization.

We all know the importance of gathering, measuring, and analysizing our web analytics data, but what often gets lost is the next crucial step - communicating actionable data in a way that empowers your decision-makers to make critical business decisions.

Data in a vacuum is useless. Without context for the figure or trend, it means even less. When people ask me how our website is doing, I like to throw out "9%" as my response (based on an extremely wonkish in-joke with my wife about statistical significance). In and of itself, that number doesn't mean a thing. But as a conversion rate on a recent campaign, or year-over-year growth in unique sessions, or a measured improvement in version b in an a/b test, it means a bit more. It becomes downright useful when you know that the same metric last year was only 2% or that that it is exceeding the target by 28%. And it becomes business-critical when you know that each 1% increase leads to $1 million in revenue or 3% fewer calls to your client support team.

You need actionable data, which is where your expertise in measurement and analysis come into play. You also need to organize the data in a way that only the most important, actionable information is summarized. You then need to communicate this actionable, summarized, compiled data in a format your decision-makers will read, understand, and - most importantly - act upon.

So how are we doing as an analytics community? How often are web analytics professionals communicating with our executive management teams? Are we communicating the right information? Are our communication strategies working?

Please take this brief (4 questions) survey so we can compare notes.

This post is the first in what should be a continuing conversation on communicating web analytics data. I'll compile the results of this survey and report back in a subsquent post. In the meantime, please leave a comment if you know of any good studies or posts out there. The purpose of the WAA group blog is to promote thought leadership, and based on my experience talking to the folks I've met, there are no better thought leaders in this space than the practioners in the WAA.