Web Reporting is More Than Page Views and Visits

The Really Real World of Wildly Scattered Data

Shortly after reading the book, we started investigating how we could put these reports in place. We already had WebTrends OnDemand but found that we needed more data than was available in our trusty statistics program. So we started listing out all the possible points of data (here are a couple of examples):

• Our sales data had to come from the mainframe because not all of our sales are processed online
• WebTrends OnDemand can't track exception reporting all that well so we're reliant on our trusty old log analyzer for that and other server-based data

The list actually goes on to about 7-10 possible datasources and no easy way to consolidate them except manually. We still haven't figured out how to solve this problem but we are trying to make up for some of it by automating as much of the data gathering as we can.

Not Everyone Wants to See All Your Stats

Try putting a bunch of numbers depicting visits and pageviews in front of most business managers and you'll get a blank stare, or worse they will equate those numbers to sales. To tell the true story of web performance you need to go back to the basics: the goals and objectives for the website.

When setting out the objectives for your site you should have been wording it in a way that qualifies it for measurement. Instead of "Increase traffic to the site" it should read "Increase searches on the website that convert to sales". Get to what you want your site to do, then figure out how to gauge it. These are your key performance indicators.

To tell a complete story, you need to consolidate the following into a compelling story:

• Research and Surveys (how users perceive your site)
• Usability Test reporting (how users actually use your site)
• Data on traffic and usage of the site

However, it takes a lot of time to pull all this information together, so for more frequent reports its best just to compile key metrics into a quick report. Again the book came to our rescue by providing a wonderfully simple format, KPI Worksheets. Using these handy little sheets, we can now put reports together quickly and in a language that is much easier to understand.

Still Going

And that's how far we've gotten. The team has put together our first monthly report and are working on our second. Its taking time figuring out how much we can automate and schedule, but its really coming together and for the first time in my career I feel the report I'm handing to my boss really means something.