Some of the most common practices in digital reporting have been shown to be seriously flawed accordingly to Gary Angel, President of Web Analytics Consultancy, Semphonic. It’s easy to criticise other people’s management reports, but is there a better alternative? Angel believes there is.
Some of the most common practices in digital reporting have been shown to be seriously flawed accordingly to Gary Angel, President of Web Analytics Consultancy, Semphonic. It’s easy to criticise other people’s management reports, but is there a better alternative? Angel believes there is.
Angel argues that there is too much emphasis on a small set of site-wide actionable KPIs, trending Site Satisfaction numbers or NetPromoter scores, and use of Total Social Media Mentions to track brand sentiment. In each case, the KPIs and metrics commonly found on almost every enterprise dashboard have been shown to be either un-interpretable or confused.
• Un-interpretable because single metrics are not, in and of themselves, action-guiding.
• Confused because site-wide metrics, online site surveys, and social media mentions are all aggregates of fundamentally different types of audiences and visit types.
Angel explains that when you combine fundamentally different types of data together, you get noise, not answers. Upon reaching this point, you’re probably tempted to ask: what’s left? It’s easy to criticise other people’s management reports, but is there a better alternative? Angel believes there is.
By embedding a digital Two-Tiered Segmentation (Audience and Visit-Type) into reporting and modelling systems instead of showing single un-related metrics, you can create truly meaningful dashboards.
Instead of showing a set of isolated KPI’s and site-wide metrics, you need to show how discrete audiences are performing on your digital properties and how those audiences and visit types add up to a complete picture of your site success.
Below is an example of a report designed to show how traffic to the Website can be broken down into separate audience types. The flows provide a compact and powerful illustration of the critically important business information: what visitors the site attracts, how this is changing, and how successful the site is with each audience type.
Example Report 1
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In Example Report 2, the health of each system (vs. forecast or historical trend) is shown in the up/down arrow in the Total Successes. Click there, and the report drills down one level into the visit segmentation for that audience type. The report explains how the overall success of the site with an audience can be further decomposed into the success of the site in meeting each type of visit that audience engages in. This type of model can even be weighted to reflect broader business goals.
Example Report 2
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This is an elegant way to show how the different audiences and visit-types fit together to form a true and accurate picture of site success. It’s an elegant way to THINK ABOUT site success. If you’ve ever been asked “How is our site performing?” and realised at once how impossible a question it is, you should be able to appreciate this way of framing both the question and the answer. Because there isn’t just one answer.
A site may be doing very well with consumers but very poorly with industry professionals. It may be doing very well with high-net worth investors but not so well with average investors. Even if you could answer the uber-question – what meaning could it possibly convey? The site is doing great. Really? And what exactly does that mean? In creating report sets where two-tiered segmentation is embedded in the model of the site, the answer to the question of “How the Website is doing” carries both an explanation of why the answer has to be of a certain type and the conviction that the answer provided is a meaningful one.
These “systemic” dashboards are designed for senior audiences – people who need to know the high-level success of the site. But you can take the same approach (segmentation and systemic modelling) to more detailed views intended for line managers. Not only does this dramatically improve the quality of THOSE reports, it creates a powerful consistency of method and view across every level of the organization.
Example Report 3, is a report of Marketing Channels shown as a system and optionally filtered by any of the audience and visit type segmentations within the business:
Example Report 3
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With this type of report, you can measure the impact of each Marketing Channel in terms of both traffic generation and site success. But more importantly, you can understand how each Marketing Channel contributes to the audience make-up of your site and their corresponding visit types and success. This isn’t just descriptive; it’s prescriptive information that can be used to tune campaign creatives and testing programs.
The bottom line? You shouldn’t have to choose between management dashboards that feature a few un-interpretable and confused metrics like Site-wide Satisfaction, Conversion Rate, and Visits or dashboards built from a daunting wall of complicated metrics. Creating site performance models based on two-tiered segmentation makes for a style of dashboarding that is deeper, more interesting, more relevant, and more understandable than either of these all-too-common reporting choices.
The secret to great dashboards isn’t Tufte-inspired white-space, the right choice for line charts, or the best looking font. It isn’t finding the one magic KPI to rule them all. The secret to great dashboards is presenting information in a model that makes sense, that drives deeper business understanding, and that provides a real answer to the question: “How is my site doing?”
By Gary Angel
President of Web Analytics Consultancy
Semphonic
http://www.semphonic.com/
