Mediaboss Marketing

As many industry observers are well aware, the Web Analytics Association, to which many of us are members, changed their name to keep up with the times. The newly named Digital Analytics Association ushers in a time to revitalize and refresh the values of the industry, so I could think of no better way to welcome this change than to redefine our industrys commandments.

If you cant measure it, dont waste time or money doing it. Recognize that all business activities cost money, whether that involves running paid search advertising, communicating via social media channels, and even search engine optimization (SEO).

It isnt the responsibility of the digital analyst to come up with KPIs anymore; its their job to answer business questions. Bring your burning business problems rather than data requests and get ready for meaningful insights rather than tired trend analysis.

Visitors to your website have names, families, and rights, so treat them as neighbors and not numbers. Do your best to avoid collecting sensitive personally identifiable information, whenever possible.

Digital analytics marks a departure from web in favor of integrated. Be prepared to collaborate with database administrators and analysts to define complex compound business metrics.

Good, better, and best is a thing of the past. Big data is all about cross-channel segmentation and modeling. Certain types of data lend themselves to certain types of analysis or action planning, but no one source is the best. Break down the walls and build bridges between silos for truly remarkable achievements.

With so many tools that can retrieve and display data, its easy to get carried away. Spending time on reporting meaningless data is a waste of an analysts and stakeholders time.

Comingling two distinct data sets that are not, in any way, shape or form related only adds confusion and misleading insight. Dont be afraid to use secondary data sources to dive deeper or test a hypothesis, but ensure your documentation includes assumptions, limitations and confidence levels.

This one is pretty self-explanatory. Digital analytics is the intellectual property of the business and should not be regarded as sole property of the analyst or organization that collects or reports on this data.

Breaking commandment 0111 wouldnt be considered a deadly sin, but this one surely is. There is no room in digital analytics for cooking the numbers. Big data affords us the ability to endlessly segment and analyze data until we find appropriate proxies for data that cant be directly collected. Put away the Excel =rand() function. Dont make up numbers.

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10 Commandments of Digital Analytics