I had a great conversation on Twitter with @rotkapchen about analytics. She said something that not a lot of people get, but really should.
A behavior in isolation of an intent is a fact without context. If someone does something + U don’t know why U’ve got bupkis.
To elaborate a little. People often ask to look at numbers, having no end goal in mind. They hope these numbers will somehow spur a flash of insight that will give them that magic KPI, you know, the one that tells you you are making tons of money from one single thing. KPI’s are what we make them, they aren’t magic numbers we find. We define the goals of the site and we craft KPI’s. They will tell us if our site is performing the way we intended it to. If it isn’t then we optimize.
The other important piece of this pie is the fact that we need to understand our users’ intent. This is where it gets tricky but insanely fun if you do it right. We have metrics to help us see users click paths, eye tracking reports, heat maps and so on. These all aid in helping us understand the intent of our customers but it is up to us to make those inferences. We need to really know who we are talking to and if we know our audience then, from the numbers, we can tell what their intentions are.
This is called turning metrics into analytics.
