So, you just spent thousands of pounds acquiring the most fashionable web analytics tool, hired a very expensive Web Analytics contractor to set up a tagging strategy and utilised the skills of an in-house developer to implement the tool - excellent! But now, the contractor has left, the in-house developer has moved onto another project, you’re faced with a bunch of numbers, an endless list of business questions and one, or maybe two analysts who are spending, about 90% of their week, churning out reports to stakeholders – hmmm, that’s not a great position to be in, let alone a way to gain valuable insights from your tool.
So, what should you do?
Well, this is where Avinash Kaushik’s 10/90 rules comes into play, which states, that for every £10 you spend on a web analytics tool, you should be spending £90 on the people to analyse the numbers i.e. a company spending £50k on any paid solution, such as Adobe (Omniture) and Coremetrics, should be spending £450k on a team of web analysts to analyze and gain valuable insights, considering that a web analyst’s typical daily/weekly role is split into the following categories:
Often, companies either are not aware of or forget the above, leaving the analysts to spend between 50-70% of their time on reporting, and just 30% for analysing, optimising and seeking out new opportunities.
It is therefore vital we all keep the following in mind:
- to get the best possible value from the web analytics implementation, we need to ensure the tagging strategy, at the very least, answers all of the business questions
- we need to keep the costs of the web analytics tool & consultancy expertise down: £10
- we should invest heavily in intelligent resources/analysts: £90
- success comes from the brains behind the people as that is where you will gain key insight analysis and not the tool
