Do you regularly run analytic reports? How often are those reports actually read by colleagues and leadership? Do you ever change plans or modify strategy based on those reports?

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Data is for Action

-  Identify areas to optimize -  Determine what content resonates -  Track towards organizational goals -  Prioritize

Map your organizational priorities to your site goals.

Focus your efforts on building a narrative of success for your organization and your site. Your narrative should articulate how the website is supporting your organizational goals and the outcomes you want to see.

Don’t get lost in the weeds. Focus on what matters and what resonates with your organization.

Again: don’t get lost in the weeds, focus on what matters and what resonates with your organization.

The Value of a Visitor.

First things first, figure out what is valuable on your site.

Remember: Don’t get lost in the weeds, focus on what matters and what resonates with your organization.

Setting and meeting goals ins not a one-man effort.

You have laid out some big ideas, but we need to be sure everyone who can impact them can be onboard. You cannot do this alone, you need buy-in.

Provide data that maps to actions that can improve the ratings.

Get in with your communications group, your subject matter experts, your managers, your decision makers. Anyone that can impact the goals you are working towards.

Don’t promise more users if you have no method of increasing your outreach or improving your SEO.

There are layers of internal audiences with varying needs. Tactical folks and leadership need different information to make their best contributions.

Your site should be organized with the user in mind, your analytics should be configured with your internal management structure in mind.

Content contributors need to clearly understand how their contributions are mapping to the site’s success and provide detailed insights into how they can specifically improve their work.

This can be automated via Dashboards, Custom Content Categories, & Segmentation.

-  Speak their language -  Focus on their issues/topics/interest area - Make them want the data.

Universal Analytics allows you to collect much more granular information. -  Capture user types via newsletter registration or on-site survey -  See how well you are reaching specific audiences and what seems to

resonate with each.

Also: collect demographic details.

Group content by topic, content type, organizational function. Assists you in benchmarking: not all content is created equally.

Build custom segments that allow you to examine the details that you need.

Again:

- Speak their language. - Focus on their issues/topics/interest area. - Make them want the data.

This will be a highly editorial report supported by data rather than a report filled with numbers.

The report will clearly:

-  describe the activities that occurred during the reporting period, -  how the digital strategy supported those activities, -  what you anticipated to happen based on past performance, and -  Most importantly: HOW IT DID.

Describe what is coming up for the next reporting period and how we anticipate it to perform (SET EXPECTATIONS)

Often traffic is cyclical based on what is going on for the organization.

Once you have your basic reporting down, start making projections.

-  Describe what is coming up for the next reporting period -  Describe how we anticipate the site to perform based on previous outcomes -  Set a target. Leadership loves to see expectations met, and it gives the

collective team a shorter term objective to work towards.

Set aside a good amount of uninterrupted time to dig in deep, experiment, figure out if any additional customizations in data collected needs to happen before you are on the hook to provide reports.

Open that door! Look to Google for answers. Blogs hold amazing resources for beginners and advanced users alike.

To build trust, and change culture, you need to clearly set expectations. Folks should know what to expect from their reports, and when they will be provided. Over promising, or overloading reports can cause timelines to slip, and lead to burnout and frustration.

In the beginning, start small.

We are not all driving around in Model T’s any more.

Start with it being manageable and grow based on what works.

“It’s not in the template! What do I do?!”

-  Enable interested stakeholders to access their own data to satisfy their curiosity (but beware of support becoming a time suck).

-  Create a timeline for when you will do deep dive reports to look into specific, one-off questions. These will derail you extremely quickly.

-  Set a schedule of a few hours each month to review the most important ones, keep it an independent schedule from your standard reports.

-  Create a process for your stakeholders to ask more detailed questions. -  Distribute a standard email address to submit ideas and questions for further

analysis.

Don’t get caught going down the rabbit hole.

Keep your reports consistent, focus on analysis.