I find this bemusing. I believe that every business venture requires a business plan and yet I see neither hide nor hair of them in my day to day dealings.
If we are talking about a whole site, then obviously business cases would be proposed at a high level "increased sales by X" etc. but I rarely see these plans and if they exist at a 'C' level they rarely filter down to the people who have to implement these things and therefore rarely by default into the analytics requirements.
This isn't just a high level problem. Whenever a new piece of functionality has to be added to a site, someone, somewhere has to make a business case for it but again, so rarely do I see this case when requirements gathering. Admittedly I work for analytics vendor, it could be argued I don't need to know, I just have to explain to the client "how" to measure things with the tool my company provides but I don't think thats the case. More often than not I'm asked my opinion on "what" should be being measured implying there isn't a clear business case stating what hopes to be improved by the additional functionality.
I do think there needs to be more clarity on higher level goals within organisations in general. Every time there is a planned change it should be communicated across the company whether it hopes to improve sales, leads, "engagement" etc. and over what period of time the improvement is being compared to. When doing this we must always take into account the seasonal difference, market differences, increased competition etc.
One of the other facets of this lack of clarity is that a site or a piece of functionality isn't usually designed to increase a single metric. Its usually there to attract and engage with a particular type of customer - maybe it's there to appeal to a younger audience, maybe mainly women, maybe mainly elderly couples looking for that cruise of a life time, whatever, there is usually a concept of any ideal customer.
The point is, if such attributes have been made clear in building the product or functionality, consideration needs to be given to how you measure the targeting of these populations. Is the site really attracting the kinds of people you expect for your product? Are they really performing as you'd expect? It amazes me how often these kind of considerations get lost between the creative product development department and the department in charge of actually making things happen online. I think this is often a reflection of the business goals not being communicated around the company and the creative team not taking responsibility to prove the benefit of their fabulous new ideas.
So what things should people be considering? Well often its a question of "To what segment is this new thing supposed to appeal?" and the challenge is to get a baseline of that "segment" performance now and after go live of the new technology. (I'm ignoring the concept of MVT right now because you dont always have the traffic or capability to test everything in isolation).
In order to get information on that segment think about the following
- Look at the demographics of people purchasing/registering (i.e. use the existing methods of data collection for analysis.
- collect ad-hoc survey information and tie that into user behaviour.
- Implement some additional functionality that encourages input of information you know is correlated with your segment. (i.e. teenagers are unlikely to respond to competitions for stairlifts).
- Analyse targeted marketing of your segment and compare to the random sample of marketing
- Buy data from other agencies for enrichment if it can be tied to your own.
"What are we hoping to achieve and how are going to measure it??
And once your organisation asnwers that for any piece of functionality this should be communicated to all involved in the venture so that even if the specific details are not there all those involved are aware of the goal they are working towards giving much more focus to the
overall project.
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