Understanding the Analytics Cycle

In this simple, yet important video, learn about the steps involved with doing analysis of your site’s data. Taking a little time to understand this process can make all the difference in the success of your Analytics program.

Transcript
Hey everybody, this is Doug. In this video, I want to talk about the analytics cycle. Now, I know that we typically want to jump in, and start an implementation, and get code on page, and run reports, and see all the pretty numbers, and the pictures, and visualizations, all those kinds of things. But it will help you if you take a few minutes to understand this cycle before you really jump in and put code on page and do those kinds of things. So the first three parts of this cycle really could be considered part of a larger implementation phase, okay? So, we’ve got define, design, and deploy. Now, the first thing you want to do, which is maybe obvious, but you want to define your business needs, you want to think about what you’re going to be doing. And so, you’re going to think about these business needs within use cases, what am I trying to measure? What do I need to know about my website? And you’ll be highlighting risk factors and estimating the value opportunities, you’ll be thinking about how much time it’s going to take you, and those kinds of things. But you’re going to define what you’re going to be doing, and we’ll talk more about writing down those business requirements in another video. Now, secondly, you want to design. So you’re going to take this definition, here are the business requirements. And I’m going to design a tracking strategy that captures the right data with the right key performance indicators, right? To see if it’s working the KPIs of the business needs. So, I do need to set up the tracking so that I can tell if I’m being successful on my website. Well, that means we also need to define how we determine if our website is being successful. And of course, those are the KPIs, key performance indicators, or the numbers that tell us if we’re being successful on our site. So we take this definition, these business requirements, and we design a tracking strategy. I’m going to capture this data in this variable, etc. And then we deploy. So we implement the technology required to capture the data as outlined in our design phase, our measurement strategy. And so, this is when we will use Adobe Launch to capture that data and send it into Adobe Analytics. So, there you go, we kind of define it, we design what we’re going to do, exactly get tactical on that, and then we do it, we deploy it.
Now, the next thing you’re going to do is, you’re going to analyze. So, you’ll have insight-driven analysis, and they will expose challenges as well as identify opportunities for growth. So, you’re going to look at reports but not just pull reports and look at them and say, “Neat.” You’re going to analyze what this is telling you. So, it’s so important to look at the reports and make some determinations about what this data is telling you. And lastly you’re going to act on this data. As you can see here, leverage analysis to inform the personalization of your customer experiences through on-site testing, off-site acquisition, or loyalty retention programs, etc. So, you’d be surprised at how many people unfortunately, that we see that do the first four, and they don’t do number five. So, they’d go all the way through the defining and the designing, deploying, they even look at the reports and analyze, and they’re like, “That’s cool.” And then the things that they actually change on their website, or the things that they actually change in their marketing to get people to their site, don’t really have anything to do with what they have seen in the reports and the analysis that they have done. And so, be sure that the acting that you are doing is in direct relation to the other four steps here, the things that you have done. Now, as you do that, and as you act and change things, that sends you back into the definition phase, right? Because you’re going to have to go, "Okay, now, here’s what I think we need to do "because of what we saw. "So I’m going to define that, "I’m going to design it and deploy it. “We’re going to change things.” And we just go around and around here until, yeah, forever, until forever. And so we keep going as we mature our analysis on our website and get more and more information, and get better and better at acting on the data that we receive from Adobe Analytics. So again, this is a very important cycle to go through, and it should feed itself like this so you can go over and over through this and get more and more, and better information, and be able to act on those insights that you have been given through this tool. -
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