Using Your Web Analytics to Optimize Your Website’s Performance
Maia Nuguid, Founder Web Analytics Philippines; & Web Analytics Manager at US Auto Parts (Philippines)

Maia begins by introducing Web Analytics Philippines as an initiative to unite web analysts in the country to share and discuss the latest trends and developments of WA, much like SEO Philippines.

(Okay, I had to pause blogging to take Maia’s picture, hee!) By the way, Maia is a fan of raising hands, or so she says. :)

Moving on with the Web Analytics Process, it’s a cycle of these three elements

Click-stream Data –> Outcomes Data –> Experience Data –> and back

Tracking the experience data completes the web analytics process. Click stream (visits, page views, hits) and Outcomes data tells your visitor’s behavior in the site. What’s interesting to find out is their “experience” and how to drive them to click or to act.

Steps to Actionable Web Analytics:

1. Define business metrics / KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
+ Business drivers: Measure progress towards goals
+ Diagnostic metrics: identify which areas of optimization
+ Common KPIs: orders, conversion rates, visitors

2. Report your data. It takes a lot of effort, art, and creativity. Management does not need to see all digits, just report what’s important.

3. Analyze your data
+ Compare: goals, trends and benchmarks
+ Integrate: multichannel analytics tools or products, offline busines data

4. Optimize and Act. Web analytics is not a standalone department, it should collaborate with user experience specialists, etc.
+ AB and multivariate testing, usability studies, surveys

Checking for statistical significance does not require you to be a “super statistician”. (Yay me!) Sometimes, the difference between two tests is NOT significant. Lots of online tools to test significance, although Maia did not mention any. (Or did she? Hee. Numbers make me dizzy)

Competitive intelligence is important because it allows you to see and analyze your position in the industry you belong.

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” ~ Einstein (I have to get that LOLcat image Maia used! Heh!)

Web analytics is a “rinse and repeat” process. It has to be an ongoing initiative (read: a special in-house department in your company which regularly feeds each department reports and analyses that should be used to enhance and develop processes). Actionable analytics is time sensitive.

Web analytics is no longer just logs.

Web analytics is a process. (Go Web Analytics Philippines!)

In the Q&A portion, Maia recommends Omniture Site Catalyst as the best web analytics tool she’s ever used. But also recommends Google Analytics because it’s comprehensive and most of all, free. (I squirm in my seat again as I think about our Yahoo! keynote speaker hee!)

To end, I’m glad that I sit beside Maia in the office, and all these overwhelming information she just presented is just a seat away. Congrats Maia! Great talk! :)