In his book What Leaders Really Do, John P. Kotter defines management as "coping with complexity," a discipline that emerged as a necessary component of operating large, complex organizations. Just as coping with complexity is needed for managing groups of people and processes, it is also critical to managing a website. Over the past year, we've attempted to focus in on and refine the process of web development and design, beginning with the planning stages and moving all the way through to quality assurance. Time and again, the management techniques stand out as the defining characteristics of a successful process. While many of our clients begin their relationship with us primarily concerned with production issues, it is not long before coping with the complexity of the process becomes the thing they care most about.
But a successful project is only the beginning of success; it's not until after a site is first launched that things really get interesting. That's why we've paired our refinements to our development process with an increased focus on showing the various ways a website can be used as a central element of an effective marketing strategy. The web partner, having already worked alongside the client over a period of 6-9 months on the initial project—from early stage consulting, through prototyping, design, build, design application, quality control, content integration and finally going live—is best positioned to know exactly how to assist in the actual life of the website. This is when the long-term relationship between a client and its web partner is at its most valuable, where measurement and evaluation enable incremental adjustments to a website's functionality and design in order to maximize its impact on the bottom line. Again, coping with complexity is key. We believe that centralizing website management in a comprehensive system unifying Content Management, Measurement, and Project Management is necessary to making the life of a website truly fruitful, and the experience for the manager easiest.
This month, I'd like to use Newfangled's new Website Management System as an example to examine the three areas I mentioned above, particularly focusing on advanced website measurement enabled by integrating with the Google Analytics API. I'll also show a bit of what's new in our latest release, as well as a preview of the upcoming project management tools within the system. Each aspect—content management, measurement, and project management—is critical to coping with the complexity of managing a website.
I am amazed at the unreal information you can obtain from google analytics. I place that javascript code on all my sites.
You mentioned that third-party applications won't be able to provide the detail of reports that you're pulling in to your system, but if you're using the API, can't they do that too? Maybe I missed the point?
Russ,
I agree! Google Analytics is incredible, and getting it for free- unreal.
Chris
I am consistently amazed at how much info you pack into these articles!
Richard,
I can see how that point may have needed a bit more clarification. As I mentioned earlier in the newsletter, we are pulling in data from the Google Analytics API and merging it with data that we gather from custom tools within our CMS. Specifically, they are tracking tools that can follow sessions starting from any specified source. We've built individual session trackers for traffic coming in from aliases, newsletters and Google traffic, though they could be amended for pretty much any specific entry point. Once a session is tracked, it is assigned a numeric ID, which remains the session's identification until that user fills out a form on our site. Once that happens, the form data (name, email, etc.) is matched to the numeric ID. Now that I have a name and contact information for the session, I have some very valuable data about my new lead- what pages they viewed, how long they spent on them, etc. Google Analytics does not allow data tracking to specific user information, so it has some limitations in terms of lead management. Aside from looking at this data in terms of a specific person's behavior, it's also helpful to consider user trends- what pages are most viewed from different points of entry, how much time in a session from those entry points, etc.
Now, taking these two sources of data and creating a dashboard around them already exceeds what a third-party script might be able to do, simply by virtue of the custom tracking data. But, having the same company that creates your website also provide these new measurement tools and guidance on how to use and grow them is a unique opportunity. At any point, we could add in custom reports to any individual client's dashboard with ease. This is the main difference I was trying to point out.
Thanks for reading,
Chris
Richard,
Chris is spot-on with his description of what our internal tracking tools add to the product and how they operate. When I was developing the new dashboard and integrating the wealth of data that Google provides, it was a challenging endeavor to mix and match it with our own, internal store of data. As Chris stated, Google Analytics is technically capable of tracking individual users' behaviors, but their terms of service prohibit adding any personally identifiable information to a user's Google tracking session.
We've pulled as much data as we could from Google Analytics and supplemented (and surpassed, in some instances) it to provide a lot of insight to not only how the website is performing across all users, but also to narrow in on how specific users use the website.
Nolan
I like how you are consolidating multiple referrers from the same domain by indenting the subpages. I wish Google did that!
@Peter Bryant, Thanks, the last few have been pretty dense. I'm intending to do a lighter one at some point...
@Sean, Good eye! Yes, that was a big feature for us. As we were working with Nolan to put together these reports, determining some layout improvements was a big priority, as we were limiting the actual real estate for each report significantly in comparison to Google Analtyics.
For those readers that didn't notice this aspect of the reports (it was shown in the second image on the second page), here's a detail: