Who Should Do Your Website Reports?

So you want to know what is going on with your website, but who should produce the report?

You may have experts on staff to do this for you or you may consider engaging your web development company or advertising agency. This may be convenient, but is it the best option?

There are a few things to consider before making this decision. To help you make an informed decision here are a few questions to ask:

1. Does the person/company responsible for the report have a vested interest in the results of the report?
2. What are the qualifications and experience of the person producing the report?
3. Do their reports not only point out what happened but to also explain why it did and what action you should take?

These three questions will help you to find out whether it is best to employ existing staff, user your developers or advertising agency or to engage a specialist company such as Panalysis.

Let's examine each of these in turn.

Vested Interest

A substantial number of companies rely on their web developers or advertising agencies to produce the reports that verify the impact of the work undertaken by the agency. Alternatively perhaps someone from the web management team who is responsible for producing the report. It is a rare individual who in the face of evidence that shows that a decision they or their company has recommended hasn't worked out as planned can honestly report this without spin, justification and/or bias. Even if the producer of the report wasn't directly responsible for the initial decision it is likely that they will face pressure to find other positive facts to report and possibly omit any negative findings at all.

In order to make informed judgements as to the success, failure or otherwise of any venture the producer of the report should be completely independent of the findings of the report.

It would be farcical for any audit of the financial situation of your organisation to be done by the same person who prepares the books. Your website performance reporting is no different. Independence and non-bias should be the main priority when selecting who is to produce your reports.

Qualifications & Experience

Anyone can claim to be able to produce a report on your website but do they really have a background that includes qualifications and experience in detailed data analysis. It is often just assumed that your web development team or advertising agency know what to do. In reality this is rarely the case. There are many factors to consider when assessing and diagnosing issues with the website and marketing initiatives.

You should ask the analyst/report producer what qualifications and experience they have. If they don't have qualifications that include business or data analysis, then you should ask why their qualifications are relevant to analysing the data from your website. Often good analysts have a broad background and may have multiple qualifications in areas as broad as the arts, business, computer science and related fields.

Just because someone can run a search engine marketing campaign, design a website or write HTML code doesn't make them a good data analyst.

There are very few web analytics experts available, most of these are members of the Web Analytics Association and can provide a long list of customer references for you to check.

Report Quality and Clarity

The key test to prove the skill level of your analyst is to assess their reports. A good analyst will assess your objectives and provide reports that show how the website is performing against these. They will not only explain what happened with your website and marketing campaigns, but also clear recommendations of what to do next, the expected outcome of the recommendation and a method by which you can assess the results.

Poor analysts or report producers will simply provide tables of numbers which are often confusing and lacking in clarity. Common sense should prevail, if you don't fully understand the reports that you have been provided or they are not clearly aligned with the organisational goals, then you have the wrong person producing the reports.

About Panalysis

Panalysis is a company specialising in web analytics and marketing optimisation. We are independent and will provide you with not only unbiased reporting but also deep expertise that you can draw upon to grow your business online. For further details please contact us.