“Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door ... I betook myself to linking fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore—what this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore meant in croaking ‘Nevermore.’”
In the first chapter of this book, we said that smart companies make mistakes faster. It’s perhaps more accurate to say that smart companies adapt faster, learning from their mistakes and forever tightening the feedback loop between what they attempt and what they achieve.
The monitoring tools and measurement techniques we’ve covered in this book are your eyes and ears, giving you an ever-improving view of your entire online presence. We’ve tried to lay out some fundamental principles within these pages: determine your goals, set up complete monitoring, baseline internally and externally, write down what you think will happen, make some changes, experiment, rinse, and repeat.
If writing this book has taught us anything, however, it’s that the technology of web monitoring is changing more quickly than we can document it. New approaches to improving visibility surface overnight, and things that were nascent yesterday are mainstream today.
In the course of researching and writing the text, we’ve talked to over a hundred companies building monitoring technologies—some still stealthy—and this has afforded a tantalizing glimpse of what’s coming.
All of the monitoring we’ve seen in this book serves one of two clear purposes: accounting or optimization.
In many ways, analytics is simply how we account for the online world. After all, we’re collecting metrics, such as daily sales, average shopping cart size, and advertising revenue. Accounting-centric analytics is likely to become the domain of the finance department as that department pushes for more visibility into the online business.
Today, analytics is an afterthought in most application development efforts, thrown in as JavaScript tags just before a site launches. This is unlikely to continue. Expect accountants and controllers to define standards for data collection from web systems, and expect investors to demand more real-time data on the progress of the online business. It won’t be long before Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) are part of the requirements documents that web analysts need to incorporate into their analytics strategies.
The other half of analytics focuses on continuous improvement. This is the domain of product management, interface design, and copywriting. The goal is to get more visitors to do more things you want for more money, more often. Every tweak to your site is an attempt to edge ever so slightly toward that goal, and every visit a hint at whether the attempt was successful.
While much of this optimization can be done manually, at least at first, organizations with sites of any substantial size will soon find this an overwhelming task. They’ll turn to multivariate testing, as well as the automation of usability analysis and visitor feedback, allowing web platforms to adjust their content and layout dynamically to maximize conversions based on what works best for a particular segment.