As part of this ongoing series of posts on communicating analytics data, I launched a survey back in February to see how web analytics professionals are communicating with their executive teams. I'm going to step through the entire survey results in my session at eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Toronto, Canada before unveiling on this blog, but it turns out that most of the respondents communicate site visitor analytics on a weekly or monthly basis. This seems like an entirely reasonable span of time, but does it work for all KPIs? What about your most important metrics? How many times have your executives come to you out of cycle for a daily update — even when they'll be getting an update at the end of the week?

Ambar Shrivastava, the Chief HitTail Analyst at (oddly enough) HitTail, is tasked with driving registrations. If you're not familiar with HitTail, they provide a free, real-time service that tells which keywords are driving visitors to your site. HitTail also has a premium paid version, and, in a nutshell, those two offerings lead to Ambar's primary metrics:

• Number of registrations
• Number of paid registrations
• Number of visitors to the website (and subsequent conversion rate)

He regularly communicates a number of other data points, but those are the primary points of interest to his CEO (and the success of the program). Ambar created a real-time ticker to report on just those 3 data points. That way, executive management could access their most important KPIs at any given point without tataking up any of Ambar's time. If they have other reporting questions, he can still manually pull some numbers for them, but this gives the executives exactly what they the majority of the time — without any added complexity or information they don't need.

It has an added monitoring benefit as well — if he didn't see any signups for 3 hours, he might know something is wrong with the registration system. If he sees a huge spike, he might know it's time to start shopping for a vacation home in the Hamptons.

At my employer, some ancillary data, like web site visits and number of documents read, are batched and updated every 24 hours in our web analytics tool and data warehouse. My primary metrics, like registrations and eCommerce purchases, are accessible real time through our CRM tool. Accessing information in real time allows our executives to get their ROI and financial fix whenever they want. Combined with a scheduled, more in-depth reporting, this has drastically reduced the amount of time I spend responding to one-off data requests.

The more we as analysts can do to push information or make information accessible to our stakeholders, the more time we'll have to work on strategic, actionable recommendations based on the data. If you give them access to the information they want, you can optimally put together scheduled reports of the data they need (even if they don't know it).

Comments

[Bogdan Secara]

Corey,

Excellent post! I could not agree with you more...

However, different KPIs are suitable for different reporting schedules, and real time reporting is not necessary the best "one-size-fits-all" solution... Take for example an online newspaper (from a traditional publisher): the customer retention KPIs would still make sense to be reported on a weekly basis, while an hourly click streaming reporting would not be quick enough (from the editor's perspective, provided articles are posted with a higher frequency). And, to make things worse, in addition to the "how often" issue, there is a "how much" issue (e.g. different report users have different "capacities" for digesting information).

A practical question - which is more important: avoiding data overload or escaping data lag?

[Corey Mathews]

Hi Bogdan - thanks for the feedback. I think you're absolutely right: real-time reporting isn't going to be totality of your communications plan. In many cases, real-time data won't even be actionable; it's the long-term trends that are of the most interest. But the advantage of real-time data is that it takes the onus off the analytics practitioner to provide the data. If an executive has real-time access to selected KPIs, it frees you up to focus on the more complex reports - and on providing actionable, strategic recommendations based on your analysis. There will always be a need for scheduled communication in addition to a dashboard or ticker. I'd say avoid data overload in all circumstances, regardless of the timing. Give your stakeholders the information they need as simply and concisely as you can.

[Luisa Woods]

Corey,

Thanks for sharing this with us. I have just implemented your code on my blog as a test, and am waiting breathlessly to see the results. As a marketer for an investment information publisher, knowing what issues our readers are interested in is critical to the editorial and marketing teams, and the job of slicing GA data in time to see the evolving trends is onerous.

One question, can your tools help us to identify evolving trends outside of our existing scope, in any way?

[Ambar]

Hi Luisa,

This is Ambar from HitTail. Thanks for signing up and we look forward to hearing your feedback.

HitTail delivers site-specific suggestions as opposed to reporting on industry-wide trends that may be outside the scope of your site. The idea is to provide actionable data that helps webmasters and bloggers better connect with their existing readers as well as attract new readers interested in similar topics to what you already have on your website. This differs from other analytics tools that mainly describe what is happening on your site with little information on how to improve it.

A sudden influx of traffic to your site on a specific topic could indicate a wider trend. Here are a few examples of how a blogger was able to stay ahead of the curve in identifying emerging trends based on HitTail’s real time information.

http://www.hittail.com/blog/2008/02/digg-breaking-news-stories-and-break.html

http://www.hittail.com/blog/2008/02/hittail-gave-me-hot-topics-bloggers.html

We hope you also find the real-time data useful for your blog.