My First Assignment, Suggesting Action from Insight

I was fresh out of university in 1999 from a Cognitive Science degree and had my first assignment measuring web traffic for an ISP (Internet Service Provider).
I’d got about 3 days to come up with something interesting that could be used by the business to promote web analytics.

I came up with interesting stats about who did what, where and how they got to the site, but found what I thought would be the killer stat.

The ISP had a 4 page registration process and I’d found that about 50% of the time a customer reloaded the 2 stage of the process, not only that, some reloaded 3 or even 4 times with many with many people then dropping out at this stage. I looked at this stage closely, there wasn’t much to it – it was all about selecting your logon details and some minor personal info. I went through the process myself a few times and then suddenly I had my first work related eureka moment. It was very likely that these people are having the page reload once the usernames they originally select are thrown out because someone else has already picked them.

I write up my findings and present this to my business contact indicating that the registration Key Performance Indicator (KPI) could be improved, suggesting they provide customers with recommendations of alternative names they may like once the first try fails. (common now, but not something sites did in 1999!).

My business contact looked at it, considered it and took it away for conversation with his colleagues. A week later I spoke to him asking whether they would be making the changes to the process based on my recommendations.

He responded to me, the young green graduate suggesting that yes, the change would come but not for a number of weeks. When I asked him why it would take so long he said that thanks to my discovery his small team would be spending their time convincing advertisers who place their adverts on these pages to spend more money, because they could guarantee that for 50% of the people who see this page, they would see their advert more than once in a visit – the “fix” would come later...
Analysts often find it hard to suggest actions from their KPI’s and analysis. This isn’t due to those figures not being actionable, in many cases I’ve seen that analysts make good suggestions – just not ones that respond to the needs of the business they serve, and if they aren’t great, people dont listen.

If you’re a web analyst struggling with providing actions from your KPIs and insight, get to know more about the business requirements and strategies of departments that your analytics serves – from there your suggestions will become more relevant and more regularly adopted.