I was excited as I read Gary Angel's post on Modeling Traffic , last night, on my handheld; I was too exhausted from doing a clients' SEO work, painting and changing my hotel for the LeWeb3 trip later this week (I posted about why I might need to in My Room in Paris - is going to be clean or full of bed bugs?, earlier) to write anything much yesterday.
Gary Angel showed reports that most of us pull - the traffic reporting stuff that often seems so pointless as it doesn't give insight or show why. And then...he showed us some of the recent stuff (I'm sure he didn't show us everything) that Semphonic is doing to improve their reporting and came up with THIS:
This is exactly what we all need to start doing - yes, it mean having some Excel coding done, yes it is somewhat involved - but this chart is one of the most relevant things I've seen anyone in Web Analytics produce - ever - and this is what I want to start doing myself. According to Gary:
To do this we dump all of the relevant data for the model into a working spreadsheet. Then, we create a (fairly complicated) Excel Macro that processes the data using the analytic model. It then populates the report spreadsheet with the core numbers being tracked along with the analysis of the key causal factors and counter-trends.
The beauty of this approach is two-fold. First, a good deal of analytic complexity and intelligence can be built into the model. This can prevent a decision-maker from misunderstanding or missing the contribution of key factors (like visitor loyalty) on traffic. Second, it allows the report to encapsulate all of the key information in one simple presentation that provides actual immediate and well thought-out answers to the inevitable questions.
What Semphonic came up with is a way to merge analysis and reporting ... I'm very excited about this - and this is, from my point of view, a very important post by Gary Angel, one everyone who does Web Analytics should read (and subscribe to his blog).
In short, this chart, encapsulates and surpasses everything else he put in the his post - and the funny thing is .... it looks simple - but it's not - really great ideas are often like that.
Comment Preview