Web Content Mavens Meeting: Tuning Up Your Web Analytics

I attended the Web Content Mavens Meeting tonight. Phil Kemelor gave a presentation on “Tuning Up Your Web Analytics”

I didn’t think that the presentation itself provided much value. Everything that Phil said boiled down to the following: Make sure everything you do with web analytics helps the business.

In other words, think about what questions you want your web analytics to help you answer and always try to tie that back to something of business value. This is a very important point, but one that I feel is self-evident and certainly one that can be made in less than an hour.

I was disappointed that he didn’t offer specific suggestions for how to improve your usage of analytics. Instead he stayed in the land of platitudes with suggestions like “Reach out and touch a stake holder” That said, web analytics helps to answer questions that are business specific, so coming up with general advice is clearly a difficult task.

To be fair, I think that I am a bit more technical that the target audience of the talk, so maybe others did benefit.

In any case, the meeting had a good crowd and was well organized and the sponsors paid for free beer which was cool. Thanks to the organizers.