Magnifying Glasses, Microscopes and Web Analytics.

We have been talking to and working with a lot of companies this year for web analytics, and an interesting trend has been emerging with the executives that we are dealing with. Most digital decision makers we talk to either want to have Napkyn deliver ‘magnifying glass’ focused consulting on a few critical business metrics every month, or they want us to pull out the microscopes and look for new revenue potential in the specifics of their data.

In understanding these two types of executives, their motivations and ultimate goals, we can quickly see what value a good web analyst can immediately bring to an organization.

Executives who are responsible for a digital channel tend to fall into one of two types:

Analytics for performance management (macro level analysis) : Macro executives view WA data as a set of health metrics that can be used to understand the digital business. Their ultimate goal is to have a small set of business critical metrics that they can monitor to assess their online success. An example of this would be Patrick Byrne at Overstock, who says that he continually monitors their net promoter score as an operational success metric.

Analytics use in the Internet Retailer 500: Interesting Findings

Like any fast growth company, we use cold calling at Napkyn as a way to start off long term relationships (and sometimes get hung up on). We take pains to follow the number one rule of cold calling: Never waste anyone’s time. The best way to follow this golden rule is to do some homework on a company before you call them.

Which leads to today’s blog post. After this recent article profiling the impact we have had at Scentiments (#384 on the IR 500) we have been signing up new customers across the IR 500 who want to better understand their data and grow their sales.

So we are reaching out companies with under $75 million revenue (#s 315 to 500) on the Internet Retailer 500. In the interest of making every sales call useful for us and the companies we’ll be calling I have been profiling analytics tools usage.

I was so intrigued with the results I did some rough analysis to share with readers of this blog. Feel free to ping me with agreement or hate-mail on my findings.

Napkyn Featured in Internet Retailer

It has been a crazy few months of growth, and today Napkyn was written up by Internet Retailer, the leader in eCommerce news.

One of our clients, Scentiments.com (number 384 on the IR500) was featured in a story where they discussed the revenue impact that ongoing analysis has for an eCommerce business.

Segmentation and Conversion: Closer to the Heart

In a previous post I referenced the importance of considering only ‘convert-able’ traffic when looking at a goal conversion rate, i.e. only look at US visitor data if you don’t ship or service outside the US.

The reason that you always look at conversion when analyzing web data is because it allows you to always answer the “So What?” questions you receive when talking about data.

Lets use a few made up 'boss conversations' to illustrate:

The best things in life are free....kinda.

One of the most interesting things about working at Napkyn is that every discussion with a prospect or new customer is a fascinating one. The reason is that every serious owner of a web presence, whether is it a store, lead gen site, non-profit, or even blog is running analytics. Because these analytics tools are only 2% utilized, each discussion we have tends to be informative (for both sides), and interesting, aligning different reports with different unique business requirements.

While every business we talk to has individual needs, there are definitely questions that are pretty standard. A few of them have been discussed in the last posts, but today's post deals with a biggie:

Should I use a free analytics tool, and which one should I pick?

This is a topic worth a book, not a blog post. In order to keep this interesting (and under 20,000 words, I am going to do two posts on the issue. This one will be on the biggest points to consider when examining free analytics tools, and the next will be a discussion and comparison of the ‘big two’ of Google and Yahoo’s analytics tools. (before I start getting emails with suggestions of other tools that should have made the list, finish reading the post....explanation to follow)

There are a few high level points that should be considered when thinking about free analytics tools: