Making sense of data can be difficult if you don't step back once a year and look at the big... [+]
I work in front of two monitors. The first is my main screen and the other displays my website's real-time analytics all day long. This is akin to a retailer knowing when customers are coming through the door and seeing what they're purchasing. Over time you'll have a good understanding what's working and what's not. However, if you were to rely on this data alone you'll likely miss larger patterns and shifts; which is why every January I put together a year-end round-up of data that paints a more complete picture of where my website has been and the direction it's headed. Here are seven tips I've picked up along the way when I'm putting together my data.
1. Have purpose. Drilling down into data can be an endless and arduous process if you don't know what you're looking for. For my website, which is first and foremost an editorial product, I want to know how many people visited my website last year, what the top story was, what the top page was, what the top city was, what article was printed the most, and so forth. If you're selling products or promoting a service, find the data that will give you usable insight.
2. Know the context. I do a little consulting and I can't tell you how many times I'll show a person their own data and they'll ask, "Is that good?" The answer isn't simple. If, for example, they had 50,000 unique visitors per month last year, is that good? Well, if the year previous was only 10,000 per month I'd say they're doing pretty good. Although if they're expecting these 50,000 visitors to purchase something and sales are actually down from that previous year, perhaps they're driving the wrong visitor. Putting together this type of data provides a baseline for comparison going forward and a better understanding of what the numbers mean.
3. Put together "Top of the Year" lists. When looking at year-end data I'm looking for meta patterns and information. I have found that putting together a list of the top metrics in various categories can be very revealing. I create a two lists: one that displays just the No.1 ranked items, and a second that lists the top five. By showing just the winners in the first list I eliminate the distracting noise. This makes it easy to see if Android, for example, knocked off iOS as the top mobile operating system accessing our content from the previous year (it didn't). Creating a top five list then offers a little more context for the year. For example when looking at our social networking traffic, Facebook comes in on top and Mobile Facebook settles in second place—Google+ didn't even crack our top five (we're working to change that).
4. Compile "Items of Interest." I create a special section on my report where I can put data that I think is actionable or should have an eye kept on it. For example, on several occasions Forbes staffer, Lewis DVorkin, has written about the falling price of online advertising. I found this to be true for us as well when I noticed on my interest list that we spent fewer marketing dollars and generated more clicks in 2012 compared to 2011. This means it might be time to increase our budget to get even more bang for our buck. Another item I noticed was that our mobile traffic grew 195% from the previous year and the amount of mobile traffic we received on a monthly basis in January doubled by the time we completed December.
5. Look for the shift. In 2011 roughly 63% of our traffic came from computers running the Windows operating system. Just 12 months later that number dropped to 48% even though our overall traffic jumped significantly. Seeing this number allowed me to look a little deeper and see that the rise of mobile operating systems is likely the biggest culprit for the drop. Also, as went the Windows operating system so did the penetration of Internet Explorer. Moving forward, rather than worrying as much about Internet Explorer, I need to recognize the shift and make sure my website displays properly and is optimized for the growing mobile wave.
6. Pull data from multiple sources. A frustration for me about internet data is how inconsistent it can be. If I look at my web traffic from four different sources I'll get four different numbers—and they're likely not close. That doesn't mean I ignore various sources. When I'm putting together my year-end data sheet, I like to gather specific data from different applications to help paint a more complete picture. For example, my website uses the social sharing tool, AddThis. While I know that Facebook drove the most social traffic to my website using Google Analytics, the data report from AddThis informed me what article was shared the most using their tool—it was an article titled, "Putting Your Spouse Before Your Parents."
7. Share your successes. You can do a lot of things with data, but one thing you shouldn't do is keep it to yourself. Let your staff know what the numbers are telling you. If a team is responsible for the performance of a particular channel, make sure you let them know. Letting others in on the metrics will motivate and allow them the opportunity to see things from a fresh perspective. They might even catch a pattern you hadn't recognized. Remember, this information has always been there, we just weren't able to mine it as easily as we are today. Don't dig all this great info up and then lock it away so nobody gets to see it.
