The Act & Analyse Statement

Actionable Analytics is one of the goals of every analytics apprentice. This is what UBC Web Analytics Award of Achievement teaches its students and this is what the Web Analytics Association is lobbying for.

“Actionable analytics” is about looking into you analytics tool and identify that data that helps you take a fast decision about improving your website. Certainly, who reaches to posses the power of actionable analytics can call himself a “web analytics ninja“.

How to get there though? Easy ain’t, but neither impossible. The more you just play with analytics data, the bigger chances are that you will fall into the pit of  being a reporting squirrel. For me the problem was that I always felt I don’t posses enough data in order to get into the acting part.

Act & Analyse

That’s why, here at PadiCode, we decided to propose it the other way around: Act first, analyse after. Unless you are seeing your website for the first time, you definitely have an idea of what works and what doesn’t. Our advice and new way of working: ACT ON IT.

For this we just needed 2 things:

1. Prepare the specifications for the developers
2. Ask ourselves what exactly will point out if the implementation did better and we made sure our analytics tool could provide this answer.

Yes, it’s important to start with simple modifications. If it will take more than 3 days to get it rolling when working with big teams or more than 3 hours when doing everything by yourself, than the change you want to try is too big. Make it smaller. Make it easy.

The real ninjas

The real ninjas will even go one step further and base their decisions not only on analytics data but also multivariate testing. You might say that multivariate testing would be enough to decide a winner. The truth is that it is not. Multivariate or A/B Testing decides on a winner only based on one metric; you know that things are more complex than that and you want to know every bit of it. The process really matters. Not only who won, but WHY. You want the whole spectrum.

The cherry on the cake

When doing it like this, you’ll also see that even from your first “acting” you will get to doubt on the performance of other elements that are connected to what you are changing. Even without finishing the first optimization process, you’ll know for sure which is going to be the second one. Therefore, one acting leads to another and it can go like this forever. It sure goes like this on our projects… but always for the better

The analytics will not be the purpose of your actions (like it is for reporting squirrels) but what it should be: the best tool out there to help you improve the performance of your website.

So yes, this is how we, at PadiCode, believe you can master the art of ninjas, analytics ninjas that is.