Back in February, I launched a brief survey too see how web analytics practitioners are communicating our data within our organizations. A mere three months later (sorry! I've been busy!), I'm happy to report back the results. The four questions in the survey as follows:

1. Location
2. How often do you communicate web analytics data to your executives?
3. How is this data communicated?
4. Is the frequency and type of data communicated meeting your needs?

I'll step through each of the responses and provide brief commentary where applicable.

1. Location

The vast majority of the responses came from North America. I'd be interested to see the data from Stéphane Hamel's WASP plug-in or Eric Peterson's Vendor Discovery Tool and see if the response rate matches the overall usage and adoption rates. If anyone knows a good way to measure overall market penetration (i.e., % of sites within a country using analytics software), I'd love to hear it.

2. How often do you communicate web analytics data to your executives?

The following graph is a great example of how NOT to present data in a presentation. Impossible to read, too much data in too small a space, etc. I only present it untouched because we deal with charts like this every day. The key takeaways:

1. Most respondents are communicating site visitor analytics on a weekly basis. I'd be interested to hear if the recipients are also reading the results on a weekly basis and if changes are made in response to the data. The more advanced your organization, the more likely this is to be so.
2. eCommerce results (when appropriate) were more likely to be communicated monthly. With this question, I wish I'd expanded the survey a bit to see the type of companies were included. I personally report eCommerce numbers monthly as well, but eCommerce is a very small portion of our business. Many large B2C retailers should actually be reporting daily, I'd imagine.
3. VoC and A/B testing seem to have low adoption rates at this point. If companies are using these tools (and they really should be), the results should be communicated to the site's stakeholders. The data should never be used in a vacuum.

3. How is this data communicated?

I wasn't surprised to see that there's still a lot of manual work being done. As much as I rely on automated, scheduled reports for the bulk of my communication, there are still a lot of ad hoc requests that keep me nice and overwhelmed. What I didn't ask - and should have - was how many organizations have created a self-service environment.  Judah Phillips has managed to combine a self-service tool with a series of canned reports, and, as a results, he doesn't have to put much time into creating reports at all. Something to strive towards!

4. Is the frequency and type of data communicated meeting your needs?

As you can see, it's a pretty even split. My take on this is that it's still a relatively young industry, both in terms of adoption and experience of the practitioners. As we get more experienced and the stakeholders see how useful the data is, I'd hope more companies will have their needs met. In the meantime, it's an opportunity to reflect - what should we be doing differently? How can we optimally communicate this value internally?

I can't wait to try the survey again next year and see how things change. Based on what I've see at various eMetrics and Web Analytics Wednesday events, tools and satisfaction in the industry are both on a growth trajectory. I'm interested to hear what you think, so please leave a comment with your opinion or any questions you have about the survey or results.