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Wednesday 11 December 2013

Moderating "Web Analytics & Actionable Insights" at Econsultancy's Digital Cream 2013.


Recently I had the pleasure of moderating the Web Analytics & Actionable Insights panel at Econsultancy's Digital Cream 2013 event in Singapore. In my opinion the Digital Cream event is one most prestigious and valuable events because it brings the top 150 digital marketing leaders across Asia together in one room to debate and share insights.



The Web Analytics and Actionable Insights panel featured lively debate around three key themes: 

Measurement is useless without strategy.

First, that there tends to be a focus on measuring digital metrics but this is usually quite disconnected from a marketing or business strategy. The key theme of that discussion thread is that if you don't have a strategy in place, you don't need analytics to measure your success. It's critical to understand your end goal, and what metrics are important for your brand before embarking on developing a digital dashboard and key metrics. 

Be mobile first.

Second, there was a discussion around evolving platform usage. In 2013 mobile web traffic is already at 28%, with a predication of over 50% of web traffic from 2014. This means that a web analytics plan needs to think broader than PC, and focus more strongly on measuring content and interactions on mobile devices and tablets.

Resourcing for Analytics into the future.

Third discussion point was about how to get started and what resources are needed. It was agreed that if you're new to Web Analytics, it makes sense to outsource this to an agency in the early days. However, as all businesses become fundamentally digital it's important to have Analytics as an internal function. The challenge though, is that right now this responsibility is given to an already overworked marketing team or marketing manager. So the big question is whether organisations will grow specific Web Analytics teams, or whether it needs to be decentralised and made a responsibility of all marketers? The consensus was everyone needs to understand Web Analytics but for Actionable Insights, this requires a higher level of skill and knowledge. These "strategic analysts" will be the "Chief Data Officers" of the future.