Although it is time for Christmas and surely most of you had a wonderful 2009, so have you start thinking about 2010 yet? If not you should! With the continue grow by leveraging Web Analytics, what did we learn from 2009? Well here is a quick 5 steps guide to recap 2009 and start to be trendy in 2010!
- Step 1 – What is working and what is not working!
Start reviews all the metrics that you report on regular bases. Start counting how many you have now? 1… 10… 100… or 1000? If you have more than 10, you really need to think about what is your objective here. Too many data /reports / metrics will not make you smarter or brighter. Revise the metrics and filter out what you don’t need to look at anymore. Align with your 2010 plan. Suggest keeping 5 core metrics that have business meaning and 5 for your new initiatives in 2010. - Step 2 – Share it with your team and your boss.
Share what have been achieve in 2009 base on step one. Communication is the key to all party and using one standard set of metric, not 10 in each team / organisation. Show the value & advantages of having Web Analysis and point out why it is not working. Taking successes easier than failures, but we all need to learn from failures to enable to achieve a greater success. - Step 3 – Don’t trip over yourself!
Especially look out for any new metric you going to introduce. Make sure you think right and implement it right. A lot of times, this is the major cause of failures. Think though your success events and conversions, what you need to measure and what not. Don’t over complicate yourself as a lot of data / metric look simple but have deep meanings to it. - Step 4 – Tie your data with your initiatives.
Use your data to support your initiatives, read your data as they don’t lie, apart from implementing it wrong in the first place. So use simple metric like Bounce Rate, Time Spent, Browser Data, Geography and Referrer. That give you enough information like mobile, social media, SEO, SEM, content and etc. Else, you are just like the flies bumping all the way in the coming year. - Step 5 – What are the trends for 2010?
There are a few things that will be heating up in 2010 with the different medium on Web. So here you are with the Top 5 to look out for!- No. 1 – Bounce Rate x Time Spent x Return Visit
Normally Bounce Rate and Time Spent are treated as separate metrics. More and more these days we want users to spend more time on the site by providing right information. With Blog, Promotion Pages and Standalone Pages (via email marketing), only looking at Bounce Rate is not enough. Start combining with Time Spent and Return Visit to let you know if the site relevance to your uses as well as the percentage of true loyalty users who do spend time on your site. - No .2 – Mobile & Netbook
Start looking at the browser platform and watch out on the Mobile Users. If your site is mature enough, the number should be an upward trend. Therefore, don’t just follow the trend on the market but follow your data! It is always a battle of iPhone or Andriod or something new in 2010. The other thing to look out is the small screen Netbook which you normally found is a 10” screen that tries to fit your standard site into it. User will start screaming sooner or later when we talk about mobility. - No. 3 – Social Media
Although it is a booming factor in 2009 that everyone have Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or FriendFeed. Plus on top of that the localized Chinese version such as RenRen. Many sites are start invading the Social Media space without even understanding it. Don’t flush your money into the toilet again! Start using the right metrics to measure it if you already launch it. On the other hand, if you planning to be part of the game, look at your data and please do some testing! - No. 4 – Multivariate testing together with Personalisation
With more mature offering and solution out in the market for web analytics, Multivariate Testing come into play with a very important role. This is just like shopping for electronics “Try before you buy”. On the other hand this also turn Multivariate Testing as a Personalisation Mechanicism. Using user’s profile data and do testing is no difference showing relevant information / content to your users. So you can be very creative using these tools rather invests in some brand new content management systems. - No. 5 – Analytic War
With Google expanding the analytics capabilities, Adobe brought out Omniture, Yahoo! Web Analytics, CoreMetrics, WebTrends and many other small and medium players in the market. It will be a very interesting 2010 to look out for. Professional Market will become more demanding due to the shortage of professional and experience Web Analysis. Hopefully will not turn into another IT Bubble that wipes out the industry back in 2002.
- No. 1 – Bounce Rate x Time Spent x Return Visit
Looking forward to everyone view and comment are always welcome!