Shut Down Your Web Site!

Despite the title of this post, I would not seriously suggest that you shutdown your web site.  Online communications are, after all, here to stay.  But blind dedication to any tool (online or offline) does raise questions about how well they are aligned with your communication goals and their effectiveness in meeting them.  Now that you have dumped many dollars and hours into the web, perhaps this would be a good time to ask what you are getting in return. 

Whether or not you have wrestled with the measurement question before, take heart.  Finding answers can be very rewarding. But how do you know whether your site is raising a single dime, drawing new faces to your organization or cause or building a single relationship of value?  Measuring commonsense outcomes and the success of the steps it takes to achieve them is all it takes.  Getting to the right level of detail is vital. Unfortunately, many attempts at web site analytics fail because they are way too general. 

At first glance, you might think wow, 10,000 visitors came to my web site last month.  But wouldn't it be more useful to be able to say that 5,000 came as the result of a recent outreach campaign, half of them clicked to learn about a new service you offer, half were unimpressed and left the site, and 20 signed-up immediately?

The key to finding insight in the numbers is context.  To gain a contextual view of you data, you must segment your numbers into meaningful buckets.  Common visitor counts, top content lists and bounce rates must be anchored in concrete business questions, drill down for meaning and parsed through critical thinking. Because it is so easy to get data these days, many individuals are tempted to look star-gazed into the colorful high-level charts of Google Analytics.   Even I would would love to bask, a month from now, in the knowledge that minions have read my post on getting value from web analytics.  But its true value is not in the gross thicket of numbers.  But more importantly, I want to know who I have touched.