webmuesli:

“Sit down with the owner of the top ten pages to the site and look at them. I mean really look at them and ask this question: “What the heck are we trying to do with each page?” Make sure there is a clear answer.”

Source: http://www.kaushik.net/

I’m truly sorry but I could hardly stop laughing. These advices are just so far from reality.

Just as a quick exercise  I try to map out the reality that goes on and on under the name of web analytics.

It seems something like this:

1. “Sit down with the owner”

There is no owner. Full stop. I have been looking for it believe me - most of my emails were laughed at. The most helpful response I received was something like this:

There are marketing teams and activation teams and online sales teams and web developers and digital online marketing sales salad dressing makers (on a global, country and regional level) and creatives and so on. There is a huge ppt presentation slide show somewhere on the shared drive that no one ever seen (except me) about how this website looks and feels officially and what it should contain. None of the 83 slides of any of the websites says: who is responsible for it.

I tried to sit down with 3 of the above mentioned teams from which 4 said: but what do you want from me? I’m not responsible! And then they look baffled.

There is no one to sit down with. Or maybe there is: everyone.

[I carry on investigating who would be the best person to sit down with. But carry on reading. There wouldn’t be able to get much out of it at the end.]

2. “the top ten pages”

Right. A web analyst (at all of the companies I worked for) is responsible for 15-50-83 URLs that mostly contain  (well in my case) about a couple of hundred sites.

All URLs represent a different reporting suite in Omniture. To find the top 10 worst performing pages I would go through 83 report suits and run the bouncing rate report and then compare them.

Do I have time for this?

Well, once I’ve done it with 10 countries.

As the home page is the most visited that lead the list in each and every country. Not a surprise.

Then  the next 9 pages were the 9 mostly visited pages, no surprise again but not with extremely high bounce. And these  9s are different from week to week.

Fix it.

To find the 10 different country’s responsible person would be a month-long quest. And then telling him/her that the homepage has the highest bounce rate would that lead them to..? What conclusion would they come to? No-one can change the standard company homepage just because it has the largest traffic and obviously because of this the highest bounce rate. (Between 10% and 25% to be accurate. The homepage is the same in every country.)

Obviously it would be great to look at more countries and finding out what are the differences in bounce rates. Would the company change drastically the face of it’s online presence? Would they investigate this problem further? Well they hardly have time to die not to mention the millions of visitors who come every day. 90-80% of them still stays. To change this page 83 groups working behind these pages would be notified and 83 marketing teams with 83 ppt presentaitons in 80 languages and with 83 teams of creatives with 83000 pencils.

3. “What the heck are we trying to do with each page?”

I ask this question every day (because I read it in Avinash Kaushik’s blog and I try to be a clever web analyst.)

And now please help me. Really. The answer I get is the following:

“You are asking the right question.” Full stop. Then a confused look and: “The customer journey is leading them to the shop” and ooommm “visitors click on the main banner” and “perhaps they go shopping”.

Then lead them there and make it easy for them to shop - would be my conclusion. Again  company policy rules are above us and nothing can be changed without being signed off from above. Who’s above? No one knows. We’ve never seen them. If we ask: we ask the right question.

(Honestly, I’m not native English. Is this “You are asking the right question” some sort of fob off? I don’t get it. Is this an answer?”)

True that sometimes they are able to answer the question: what is the purpose of the page. Let’s say: selling something. Then I realize there’s no downstream traffic to the shop page at all from this site. Why? Because … and then the answer again: the page is not tagged correctly. Well - how am I supposed to jump into conclusions if the data I’m looking at is not correct? Maybe in reality all of the customers went to the shop. Maybe not. (I can’t check the shop’s upstream traffic for some strange reasons.)

Getting clear answers is almost impossible even asking  face to face from the right person. Being responsible for only 1 URL and optimizing one page? A holiday with cocktails. This is what it would be.

Companies like looking at whole bunch of similar pages, let’s say a product page in all countries (different reporting suits, different languages, different time ranges) and talk about them “in general”. One does not grab their attention. Two neither. They always want to talk about 100 or more.

The best I can do is to narrow down cases into one example and following my silly questioning until I get a reasonable answer. It has taken already a couple of months and I’m starting to be tired.

Conclusion is: it is extremely difficult to find the responsible person and then again hardly possible to achieve change based on data that…is not really correct.

Any thoughts?