Managing Analytics

Last time, I talked about “Analyze” and what you need be careful about.

In this post, I am going to talk about the first “M”, Monetization. In web marketing, when people talk about monetization, they usually refer to one of the two activities: the first is about how to utilize the real estate on a website and sell the space to other companies who might be interested in showing ads there. For example, if you look at www.dell.com/home you’ll find there is Nokia and Vizio sitelets at the bottom of the page.

The second is actually what I want to address here: “monetization” in web analytics’ sense, refers to the process and methodology to quantify the possible financial impact of an optimization effort based on certain facts and assumptions.

Monetization is a great tool to sell an optimization project. Obviously agencies use it a lot in their fancy presentations. Shane Atchison and Jason Burby from Zaaz wrote a whole chapter “Monetizing Site Behaviors” in their book “Actionable Web Analytics” (You can preview most pages at Google Books They built a simple yet nice template. You can view the sample here.

Of course, the same concept and similar template can be used by practitioners to prioritize the optimization roadmap.

At Dell, we have a site optimization meeting on the weekly basis. One critical item always on the agenda is to review the testing & targeting roadmap. When we first started with testing, we feared that we didn’t have enough testing ideas. But once the ball is rolling, we often find ourselves faces the problem of too many ideas. Almost everybody from HIPPO’s to sales agents has something in their minds that they are curious about and want us to test. Of course, only less than 20% of those ideas are truly valuable. Spending any time on 80% of the rubbish, your testing program is at risk to fail. How do we get to identify the 20%? We do monetization-we estimate potential impact from each test and prioritize based on dollars amount as well as ease of implementation. Using data instead of emotion to argue with those who are passionate about their testing ideas is such a life saver.

In addition to help prioritize test roadmap, it can also help us prioritize the analytics roadmap. Does analytics need a roadmap? Yes, of course! As a web analyst, I always find myself swim in the sea of tons of different requests from executives I support. The only way for me not to drown in the sea is to prioritize by monetizing all requests. The question I always ask myself is “how much more revenue or margin I can bring to the company if I spend this many hours on this request?” Astonishingly, many times I found the answer is “none, not really”. So I move on. I am lucky to have an alignment with my direct management on this process. He and I often sit down, during our weekly meeting, to review the projects I am working on and prioritize it based on monetized values. Of course, we both realize that we still have to do some monkey works nobody wants to do, such as clean up data etc. That is just part of our lives and we all have to live with it. But if you are spending most of your time in the monkey works, I am pretty sure soon you will either burn out, or find yourself replaceable.

Our time is VERY precious. In fact, I believe the most valuable asset a company has to drive site optimization is not any of the tools, either free ones or the ones they pay millions of dollars, but the time of its web analysts. We can either protect this valuable asset or let it be ruined. We shouldn’t do any analytics just for the sake of analytics. Nor we should do any analytics only to satisfy somebody’s curiosities. The end result of analytics should be either concrete recommendations to the business that some parts of the website needs to be changed, or some test ideas that the testing team can take over to execute.

Monetization is a great friend of web analysts and we all should wholeheartedly embrace it. Sadly I find often we rush from “Analyze” to “Optimize”, without really “monetizing” the efforts. Do it now, and it will help you live longer and happier.