After a beer and some calamari with a new marketing friend from Motorola, a conversation about the overuse of numbers in making marketing decisions came up. The premise was numbers made us feel safe and secure about our decisions, thus leading to good marketing work. And, this good marketing work based on analytics proved the age old “Good is the biggest obstacle to Great” theory. Instead of focusing on the reliance of analytic data to prove ourselves as marketers, I’d rather talk about the BIGGEST misconception in the online/website marketing world today: Analytics vs. Usability.

First and foremost, we need to define the two. Web analytics is the practice of measuring “what” is happening on your website through software solutions (usually tagging or log file). In the most basic form its visitors, uniques, length of stay, page views and more advanced analytics would be conversion funnels or other “key performance indicators.” Website usability is the cognitive science of understanding “why” people do what they do on your website. Common forms of usability are lab testing, remote online testing and heuristics. After 15 years of commercial use of the web, there are reams of data about best practices when it comes to how best to serve your user and so simple audits against said best practices are also a common entry-level usability engagement.
         So, here’s the rub: analytics helps you understand “what” your customers are doing, where usability determines the “why.” And in the end, to have concrete reasons for change, the “why” is a must and the “what” is only an indicator followed by guess work. Let’s look at an example. Say you and your agency are looking at your web analytic reports and notice that over 50 percent of your customers leave on your main products category page. So, you start to ask “why” are they leaving? Someone says, “Well, we don’t have enough content on that page.” Another may say, “I think they are e-mailing or calling us at this point”; and someone else may say, “I think they are having a problem finding what they want.” Who’s right? How do you know? What do you do?
The challenge really comes down to the fact that we don’t know whom the visitor is. Are they here to buy a product, research a solution, find customer services for an existing purchase? And so, we cannot assume motivations or the type of customer, we just know “what” is happening.  So, here’s the kicker: If we turned to a usability analyst, he or she could tell us with a certain degree of certainty based on past research that the most likely challenge for say, the buyer, is “we don’t have the right nomenclature to take the next click” or “ the overload of imagery is confusing to the user and causing issues with page comprehension.” So, we now are a lot closer to fixing some of the fundamental issues with the page. And if we are to get to the bottom of exactly what is going on, we will run a usability test and watch real users come to the site, ask them contextually relevant questions on why they did what they did and then get the answers to “why.” This goes back to my pet peeve of focusing on conversions vs. customer experience. If you focus on conversions, then you are trying to have your customers do what you want them to do. If you focus on customer experience (usability), then you are helping them do what they want to do. And if that is accomplished then your conversion rates will increase substantially.

So, I cannot finish this article without saying that analytics is important and needs to be part of your online marketing mix, but we cannot rely on analytics alone to be the basis for change or results. Additionally, analytics really is the easy part. Once your tool is set up correctly with the right key performance indicators established, you will be able to self-report and minimize the need for a consultant to interpret because your guess will be as good as theirs. The “why” is where it gets hard… 

—Aaron Kahlow, managing partner of BusinessOnLine

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Tags: aaron kahlow, Web Analytics, web usability

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 4:37 pm and is filed under Marketer, Web Analytics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.