It’s Not Your Digital Analytics Tool—It’s You
Does any of this sound familiar?
You frequently change digital analytics tools (think Google Analytics to Adobe Analytics to Piwik Pro)
Leadership has lost trust in your tool’s ability to deliver insights
Set and forget is the theme of your analytics implementation
If so, you may be masking organizational and process problems with a new analytics implementation.
Unfortunately, implementing a new tool will only temporarily hide the gaps in your analytics program’s processes. As the saying goes, “you can’t run from yourself”, so eventually the same problems from before will creep up into your shiny new tool.
With that in mind, it’s important to resolve the organizational issues, so your analytics program can flourish.
How to Get Your Analytics Program Back on Track
Define Your Business Requirements
Before you can determine the best digital analytics tool for your business, you’ll need to define your business needs.
A great way to build your business needs list is to conduct stakeholder interviews with the teams that will use this data to drive business decisions. In addition to your analytics folks, you should interview these teams:
Marketing
Customer Support
Personalization and Optimization
CRM
UX/Accessibility
Product Owners
The goal of these interviews is to understand how each stakeholder defines the key objectives of your website/app and what answers (whether that’s within the analytics tool or another business tool) will help them deliver on their goals.
Encourage your stakeholders to avoid vague requirements and instead align their requirements with a business objective.
For example, instead of: “I want to track button links”, your stakeholder may say: “I want to understand if conversions from mobile traffic increase with the new website redesign”.
The added benefit of focusing on key business objectives is that your data will remain focused, and your data will be used as a direct response to the business questions!
Another way to come up with your business requirements is to finish this sentence: “We’re using this tool so that_____.”
We can increase purchases on our website
We can understand where users are falling out of our lead gen flow on our app
We can bolster our existing quantitative data with contextual data to better understand the why behind user behavior
Note: Each sentence should align with a key business objective.
2. Create Clear Use Cases
Similarly to defined business requirements, you’ll want to create clear use cases for each analytics tool. This helps to set expectations about what is and isn’t tracked in your analytics tool across the company.
Here are some example use cases for a session replay tool:
Customer support: can cobrowse on the app to solve customer’s issues faster and in real-time
Web developers: can watch session replays to understand a bug instead of spending hours trying to reproduce the issue
Product owners and UX: can see how customers are interacting with products
3. Invest in Expertise
Leaders should identify gaps in expertise and then invest in increasing resources—whether that’s bringing data-driven folks in house or outsourcing to companies that can help you shape your analytics strategy around business objectives. Evaluate what makes sense for your business to spend the time building out their internal analytics team or ramping up faster with a consultant while you work to hire more people.
Like every part of the business, this will be an evolving process and decision as your business grows and your needs change along with it.
Ready to build trust in your analytics program?
Schedule a discovery call with Taylored Data to learn how our digital analytics consulting services can help you get the actionable insights you need to guide your organization.
