Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [253]
However, this is the level at which analytics programs stop. All software-driven analytics stop at the knowledge level in the information hierarchy.
Analytics programs are wonderful tools to gain knowledge about online marketing and the activities that take place. But to apply that knowledge takes something special, something more, something…that analytics software just can’t provide. And that is you, the analyst.
Arrive at an Understanding
After the knowledge you can gain from your marketing activities, you arrive at an understanding. Analytics software can’t understand the information for you; it can only answer the questions you ask. You are the missing link between knowledge of the information and the application of the knowledge—knowing what to do with that knowledge to reach understanding and, next, wisdom.
Gain Wisdom
The next step after understanding is wisdom. The experience of applying knowledge and seeing the results provides an analyst with the experience necessary to understand when and how to apply knowledge for improvements, analysis, and additional insights that would ordinarily be lost.
Although analytics software companies like to sell their solutions as being the biggest, most used, most comprehensive, and most extensive solutions, analytics software is only as good as the person getting the information out of the software. The ability of the human to get information from the computer is the critical step in all of this.
This is why the mantra exists (primarily perpetuated by Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist, Google, who wrote the foreword to this book) that you need to invest more in your analysts than in your software, because it is the analyst who will take the knowledge received from the analytics and apply it with a level of understanding. The software will not do it by itself. The missing link in analytics is the human analyst (Figure 20-2).
Figure 20-2: The analytics hierarchy is dependent upon human intelligence.
If you are not investing in the person, the analyst, or the marketer who is performing the analytics, then you could be spending thousands of dollars for a high-priced software package that is being used only to generate simple reports, because no one has the knowledge necessary to gain an understanding of how to use the information.
As mentioned already, context provides meaning. A number by itself provides nothing, but as soon as the number is presented within a context, it can then be used to develop a judgment. When you look at the search term that a specific group of visitors used, you develop a context, a story, and an event with specific requirements. You can then evaluate, judge, and make decisions about that particular event, because you have isolated it from the rest of the information, set it apart, and evaluated it specifically because of the particulars of the information.
Once you have developed context, then you can begin to build a powerful new way of looking at the data of the website, which then takes analytics from the realm of the mundane to the amazing—wisdom is the result.
You aren’t reporting numbers anymore. Analytics is not about numbers; it is about analyzing behavior. When you develop the context of a visitor, it is based on the intent of the visitor; you are a psychologist, not an analyst. The better you understand the particular visitor, their intent, their reactions, and the result of the visit, the better you will be able to improve your online marketing. Only when looking at the motivations, expectations, and reactions of your visitors will you be able to explain the behavior with a specific understanding of that segment. The explanation will lead you to better testing, better optimization, and better ideas, because you are focused on a small group of specific visitors, rather than attempting to improve the large,