1. Over time will departmentalised/silo-d analytics areas become part of a larger research and analytics function reporting directly to the Financial Director or chief executive officer? Presenting completed analysis or recommendations to executives can be far less effective on an on-going basis than the continuous, informal questioning and answering between managers and analysis. I think you need both, on-going silo-d analytics which really drills down into specific issues and centralised strategic analytics to align web analytics recommendations and objectives with overall company objectives on a strategic level (so there one number of how many customer’s you actually have rather than a politicised struggle between marketing and customer services departments for example).

2. Analytics is hard. Analytics takes resources. It takes effort for a company to create and assimilate learnings from analytics. Focus your analytics at the key leverage points of the business, for example in the case of a lead generation site such as rightmove your lead conversion rate. Focus analytics where it will have most impact to potentially help and change the business

3. Getting to a culture of fact/data driven decision making, requires your business to have real solid wins using analytics that will make people care from the top to bottom in the company. Once it is have been shown/proven that the eg the company’s conversion rate has increased due to multi-variate testing and changes to the form process or that PPC is generating a higher conversion rate or whatever the wins might be, a process of “yes analytics is important to me – it will help me – it could even help me get the bonus that I want” begins from people all over the company.

4. The analysts that you hire are extremely intelligent, humble, versative and political creatures that are in constant communication and debate with key decision makers and are at home with numbers and all the advantages and pitfalls of various analytics solutions, but most importantly are able to move beyond creating key performance indicators to aligning strategic business objectives of the website to the company’s business.

5. Well thought-out metrics that everyone in the business understands. The challenge is creating a shared understanding of the right metrics and what they mean.

6. Don’t rely on one proven and tested way to get insight. Try KPI metrics, try usability testing, try feedback forms and survey, try sophisticated metrics, try scoring systems, try multi-variate testing, try digging into the data to understand root causes and opportunities.

7. The most important thing with analytics is to get started. It is a journey not a competition. And each company’s journey will be different. Good analytics is an evolution of thinking and deciding.

Would you have chosen these 7 to be your most important things to think about when it comes to the analytics department within your company? Are there others I haven’t mentioned? Thanks so much for reading in any case